Protest Camps

by Feigenbaum, Anna; Frenzel, Fabian; McCurdy, Patrick

• ISBN13: 9781780323565
• ISBN10: 1780323565
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-11-05
• Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Summary

From Tahrir Square to Occupy, from the Red Shirts in Thailand to the Teachers in Oaxaca, protest camps are a highly visible feature of social movements' activism across the world. They are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. Drawing on over fifty different protest camps from around the world over the past fifty years, this book offers a ground-breaking and detailed investigation into protest camps from a global perspective - a story that, until now, has remained untold.

Taking the reader on a journey across different cultural, political and geographical landscapes of protest, and drawing on a wealth of original interview material, the authors demonstrate that protest camps are unique spaces in which activists can enact radical and often experiential forms of democratic politics.

Author Biography

Anna Feigenbaum is Assistant Professor of Communications at Richmond, the American International University in London. In 2008-2009 she worked at the London School of Economics (LSE) as an LSE Fellow in the Media and Communications Department. The year before, she completed her PhD at McGill University in Montreal, where her project was funded internationally by a Mellon Pre-dissertation Fellowship from the Institute for Historical Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research takes a trans-disciplinary approach to communications combining sociological and cultural studies methods around the notion of collective actions as communicative phenomenon. Her work also engages technology studies to investigate new media development and expand upon traditional notions of what count as communication technologies—to include things from shoe boxes to snipped bits of wire. Published research includes studies of global resistance to fences (ephemera 2010), women's protest music production (Journal of Popular Music 2010), and protest camp-based print cultures (forthcoming Feminist Media Studies 2013). Dr. Feigenbaum is a founding member of the Creative Resistance Research Network currently partnered to Kingston University in London and New York University/Eyebeam in New York. Always looking to combine research and creative action, she participates in campaigns around gender, sexuality, climate change and migrant rights. She is also an arts events organiser and published creative writer.

Fabian Frenzel is Senior Lecturer at the Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Bristol. His research and interest cover democratic politics with a special focus on the role of leisure, mobility and culture trans-national political action and the potentials and limits of a 'globalisation from below'. He has worked on empirical cases of democratic politics in Europe and Africa, looking at issues such as alternative media, international development and climate change. His PhD thesis, titled 'Politics in Motion: The mobilities of political tourists' is from the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Metropolitan University. It analyses critically the way activist identities and social movements are formed in practices of mobility, for example international solidarity travel or protest camps. His work has been published in journals such as Environment and Planning A, Tourism Geographies and in a variety of collected editions.

Patrick McCurdy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. His research and areas of interest cover media protest and spectacle; the media practices of social movement actors; media events; and media and international development, particularly in Africa and with a specific interest in the issue of climate change. Patrick McCurdy obtained his PhD from the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in May 2009. His dissertation, entitled I Predict a Riot' - Mediation and Political Contention: Dissent!'s media practices at the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit', focused on the ways in which radical social movement actors think about and interact with media at the site of protest. His thesis both documents the media strategies of radical social movement actors, as well as critically examines the utility of such 'spectacular' actions in an age of media saturation. His work has been published in academic journals including the International Journal of Communications, Critical Discourse Studies, and Communications - European Journal of Communication Research.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Infrastructures And Practices Of Protest Camping
2. Media & Communications Infrastructures
3. Action Infrastructures
4. Governance Infrastructures
5. Re-Creation Infrastructures
6. Alternative Worlds