Introduction: Is This What Democracy Looks Like?

 This dossier takes its cue from one of the Occupy movement’s bedrock slogans, “This Is What Democracy Looks Like” (though the catchword was first nurtured, as were many Occupy paradigms, […]

Their Fight Is Our Fight: Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and New Modes of Solidarity Today

Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and New Modes of Solidarity Today

This is What Democracy Feels Like: Tea Parties, Occupations and the Crisis of State Legitimacy

In January of 2012, NBC Politics hosted an online debate between three members of the Tea Party movement and three members of the Occupy movement. Moderated by MSNBC daytime anchor […]

Occupy’s Alliance With Labor

When Occupy Wall Street (Occupy or OWS) emerged, it seemed that organized labor would be a likely ally. Both aimed at shifting the balance of power between the sources of […]

Occupy Wall Street and Consensus Decision Making: Historicizing the Preoccupation With Process

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has given the consensus decision-making process a new lease on life by introducing the procedure to a new generation of organizers as well as thousands of […]

A Queer Home in the Midst of a Movement? Occupy Homes, Occupy Homemaking

It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular difference. (And often, we […]

For Democracy, Strike Debt: Resonances of Abolition in the Occupy Movement

How do social movements move? Tiqqun, the French collective that authored The Coming Insurrection, suggests that “movements do not spread by contamination,” but by “resonance” between radical moments, and that […]

The Islamic Republic of Iran Loves OWS: Is This What Solidarity Looks Like?

Prominent among the many democratic impulses unleashed by the Occupy Movement has been the desire to challenge dominant narratives of the world in which we live, narratives that not only […]

The Question of Infrastructure: An Interview with Michael Ralph

Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted on October 3, 2012, mere weeks before Hurricane Sandy made landfall near Atlantic City, New Jersey, bringing with it a widespread infrastructural crisis the […]

Democracy and Debt

Anyone can spot the conventional indicators of a failing democracy. An elected government suspends guarantees such as free speech, privacy, or habeas corpus, usually citing some shadowy foreign threat. Persons […]

Policing Political Protest: Paradoxes of the Age of Austerity

“We received notice from the owners of Zuccotti Park,” went the incantatory call on the People’s Mic in the predawn darkness of October 14, 2011. We—we thousands—repeated the phrase in […]

Not Your Academy: Occupation and the Futures of Student Struggles

This essay has been tasked by the editors of this dossier with answering what it would mean should the Occupy movement’s contributions to radical democracy permeate contemporary student struggles. This […]

Into the Storm: Occupy Sandy and the New Sociality of Debt

In late October 2012, after the completion of this dossier, Superstorm Sandy wrecked much of the East Coast, including the greater New York City area. Now, nearly two months since […]