Whose Occupation? Homelessness and the Politics of Park Encampments

Schein, Rebecca

doi:10.1080/14742837.2012.708834

Cited by 16 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Providing care in the context of a protest camp is also, like everywhere else, a massive challenge. To be sure, there have been questions about the anarchist tendencies of camps when security could not be provided and vulnerable people felt exposed or excluded because of a lack of common rules and limits (Ehrenreich 2011;Schein 2012).…”

Section: Movement Experiencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Spatial Organization in Resurrection City and Other Protest Camps

Frenzel

2020

Contention

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Social and political organizing and organization has a spatial dimension, and there is increasing interest in academic studies of organization to understand better how space and organization relate, interact, and conflict. There is a range of studies that look at business and workplace organization, but little evidence from social movement organization or what is sometimes referred to as alternative organization studies. This article addresses this gap by observing and analyzing the effects of spatial organization in social movements. It focuses particularly on protest camps, a form of social movement organization in which spatial organization is particularly important. It looks at the Resurrection City protest camp of 1968 to identify the development of spatial organization practices. They are carried onwards across social movements, as they resolve organizational desires for the social movement organization, such as enabling mass organization without resorting to formal membership or hierarchical structures. In summary, the article provides insight into the relationship between spatial and social organization.

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Section: Movement Experiencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Spatial Organization in Resurrection City and Other Protest Camps

Frenzel

2020

Contention

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“…Online media were experienced as empowering (Castells 2009) by some interviewees who were part of the livestream working group and who enjoyed being able to film and report outreach activities, especially those without prior media production experience. As Schein (2012) notes, service provision is ‘more than a means to movement building, […], but an enactment of the movement's end’ (p. 4). This is expressed by Alex (quoted earlier)…”

Section: Prefigurative Structuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…7.8 Many participants reported that they had made the protest camp their ‘home’, both in the sense of having a place to stay or a place where they were accepted for what they are. As in many other Occupy camps homeless people and squatters, used to occupying public space, became part of Occupy London (Schein 2012; Smith et al 2012; Wengronowitz 2013). Of course participants, differed in social, cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu 1984).…”

Section: Prefigurative Structuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Schein argues, ‘The realities of homelessness weave together many of the political and economic grievances that have converged around OWS and which underpin the right to the city: the primacy of property rights over human needs; the increasing privatisation of public goods and services and the bankruptcy of democratic political citizenship in the absence of basic material security’ (Schein 2012, p. 338).…”

Section: Prefigurative Structuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Occupy as a Free Space - Mobilization Processes and Outcomes

Roth

Saunders

Olcese

2014

Sociological Research Online

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Although Occupy has received extensive media and scholarly attention, there has not yet been systematic research on its activists’ recruitment pathways and modes of participation. In this article, we focus on the mobilization success ( Staggenborg 1995 ) of Occupy and adopt the concepts of ‘free space’ and ‘modes of association’ ( Polletta 1999 ) to understand how individuals came to participate in Occupy. We consider biographical and structural availability and make distinctions between those more or less involved. By drawing on qualitative and quantitative data gathered in November and December 2011 in London we find that Occupy activists take a range of pathways into differential forms of involvement (more or less visible or time-consuming, offline and on-line). Some participants had previously been involved in social movement and ‘indigenous’ organisations, like the church. Yet at the same time Occupy attracted novices lacking prior engagement in indigenous or social movement organisations. But what Occupy activists shared was an interest in creating inclusive prefigurative structures where the ‘path was the destination’. In contrast to the mass media's scepticism of the success of Occupy, our focus on mobilization processes and outcomes shows Occupy to be successful in this regard.

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“…Indeed, a good way to counter reductionist depictions of the encampments' spatial politics is to question who can be considered part of the collective struggle, as it were, from the start, and whose place within the protest implies a prior struggle for the right to appear within the space of the protest itself. As a result, a whole field of tensions and constitutive exclusions emerges, and that has over time been explored from different perspectives considering vectors such as gender (Salime 2016), racism and postcolonial struggles (Brady and Antoine 2012), class and homelessness (Schein 2012), or migrant status (Nair 2012), to name but a few. In the following, with the aim of further reflecting upon the relationship between the articulation of a plural political subject and the spatial politics of the protest, I will focus on a source of such tensions, (but also synergies), that have received little academic attention.…”

Section: Introduction: Zooming Out From Madridmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Performative Power of Queer Assembly

Navarro

2020

krisis

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This paper addresses some relations between the spatial politics of queer assemblies in spaces of protest and the constitution of collective political subjects. It does so by exploring the spatial politics of queer activism within the global Occupy movements, in the light of Judith Butler’s work on the performative power of assembly and the ambivalences of the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia. Specific challenges faced by queer activists in various encampments will be addressed in order to expose some tensions between the constitutive exclusions inherent to the constitution of spaces of protest and the processes of coalition building needed to effectively overcome those very constitutive exclusions.

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Whose Occupation? Homelessness and the Politics of Park Encampments

Cited by 16 publications

References 2 publications

The Role of Spatial Organization in Resurrection City and Other Protest Camps

The Role of Spatial Organization in Resurrection City and Other Protest Camps

Occupy as a Free Space - Mobilization Processes and Outcomes

The Performative Power of Queer Assembly

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