Abstract
The Occupy Movements that emerged in 2011 were marked, like other recent ones, by activists’ use of social media and participatory decision-making. In particular, activists’ move toward consensus principles of communication suggests to Heath, Fletcher, and Munoz – who not only edited and contributed to this collection but also participated in Occupy Portland – that communication theories can help us understand the complexities of contemporary social movements. In this volume, they and their co-contributors examine the macro- and microprocesses of Occupy using an interdisciplinary range of theoretical lenses and epistemological practices, including critical discourse analysis (CDA), ethnography, and content analysis, to produce an intriguing, multifaceted collection.
This multiplicity of approaches and concerns, like the gathering of diverse voices and perspectives in their edited collection, reflects the polyvocality of the movement being studied. But, as the movement also showed, such diversity can also risk fragmentation and contention. For cohesion across chapters, all contributors consider their findings through Nick Trujillo’s (1992) tripartite interpretative framework, which views social phenomena through romantic, functional, and critical lenses. As the editors claim, this multiplicity of frames not only helps address the movement’s complexity, but also problematizes single explanations of Occupy, one of the volume’s primary aims.
The collection’s well-planned structure grants the work additional cohesion. Although much of this research focuses specifically on Occupy Portland, Section 1, ‘Situating Occupy Globally’, places the larger movement in its theoretical, social, and historical contexts. In Chapter 1, Kapoor locates the discourses of Occupy among those of antiglobalization ideology, while Barnes, in Chapter 2, applies macroeconomics to consider the inequality gap reflected in the movement’s widely circulated slogan ‘We are the 99%’. Nadesan, in Chapter 3, extends these analyses by tracing uses of the term neofeudalism within the movement in order to map Occupy’s discourses among other political ones, as well as divergences within Occupy itself. Much of this theoretical groundwork may be familiar to many readers, but this contextualization effectively grounds the analyses that follow.
The editors’ goal of demonstrating ‘how applied communication theory works to teach us something new about social phenomena’ (p. 55) gains stronger footing in Section 2, ‘Local Interpretations of Occupy Portland’. In Chapter 5, Heath examines the centralization of participatory and consensus-building processes in Occupy Portland. By showing how ‘the microprocesses associated with consensus facilitated the communication conditions necessary for participatory democracy’ (p. 85), she argues that a movement’s forms of organization can shape both its ideology and communicative structures. Munoz, in Chapter 6, extends these claims by contending that Occupy’s ideological discourses of new activism – horizontalism, direct action, and diversity of tactics – formed a communicative framework that determined its participatory decision-making processes and collective actions. Perhaps the volume’s most persuasive arguments are Fletcher’s in Chapter 7. Her analysis of identity and participation attests to the ways participants who bonded around gender, race, class, or social marginalization were pulled more strongly into the movement. Notions of affinity are highly important to social movements, and much of Occupy’s horizontal organization was owed to participants collecting around shared affinities. But those affinities broke down as the Portland camp fragmented and eventually ended. Fletcher is careful to also show, through participant interviews, how emerging contradictory tensions and contested values compromised consensus-building communicative processes. It is in this section that the editors, doubly engaged as ethnographers and activists, most fully achieve the bottom-up theorization of the links between social movement communicative practices and participatory democracy.
Their dual roles as ethnographic researchers and movement participants also highlight their positionality. The editors acknowledge this at length at the start of Section 2 by explaining their personal perspectives and fieldwork processes. Perhaps a more subtle balance is achieved through the inclusion of media studies and rhetorical analyses collected in the final section, ‘Re(presentations) and Revelations: Occupy Mediated’. In Chapter 8, Lovejoy and Keeler’s content analyses of local media coverage of Occupy Portland counterpoint the participants’ experiences documented in Section 2, although that contrast might have been enriched with a more diverse selection of media sources. In Chapter 9, McClellan demonstrates ‘the process of contestation amongst vernacular and official voices’ (p. 186) by examining the public rhetoric used by Portland’s mayor to justify closing the city’s encampment. In the final chapter, Tewksbury incisively examines the links between social media and social capital in Occupy, although by extending beyond Portland to the entire Occupy movement, his assertions may diverge too far from the rooted specificity of Section 2 to maintain the editors’ aims for a bottom-up theorization.
That said, the fact that all chapters and arguments in an edited volume such as this do not neatly mesh can often prove to be its greatest strength. The contestation reveals the subject, and the lacunae suggest directions of further inquiry. At times, the editors seem uneasy with this tension. Their interdisciplinary approach strongly reflects their subject matter, but their decision to adopt Trujillo’s tripartite interpretative framework could be more strongly rationalized and better synthesized with the contributors’ various theoretical positions. Instead, the efforts to interpret Occupy’s communicative practices through a single framework while adhering to the ‘no models’ principles of horizontalist community practice become potentially contradictory. The challenge of adopting this single interpretative framework might possibly bring further insight into the struggle to maintain and insist upon consensus within a movement that, like this collection, took such strength from its diversity and polyvocality. Either way, this edited volume offers a useful interdisciplinary approach to studying social movements. Its chapter-ending discussion questions for classroom study reflect both the aims and thoughtfulness of the editors’ intentions, and its succinct presentations of key theoretical concepts are successfully balanced with detailed and compelling first-hand insight into how such social movements work.