Research Questions
Occupy Research has a lot of questions! Use this page to share research questions (RQs); where RQs overlap or seem similar, try to organize them into areas, themes, or subquestions.

Collaboration and Deliberation

• RQ: Collaboration/Deliberation. What tools/practices/techniques are used by OWS to create consensus positions, documents, comunicados, videos, texts that are shared w/the world to 'represent' the demands of the assemblies? Could they be improved? Can OWS be a useful site for codesign of deliberative tools to link f2f assembly decisionmaking w/remote participation?
• RQ: Collaboration/Deliberation. How/where/when were the tools/practices/techniques developed? What are some of the historical trajectories and influences? What about the connections/flows across occupy movements in other parts of the world (e.g. U.S., Arab World, Spain, Greece, etc.)?
• RQ: Comparisons: What are the similarities and/or differences between different occupation sites (within the U.S. and beyond) in terms of tools/platforms/techniques, forms of organization/collaboration/deliberation, tactics, participants, etc.? Via what mechanisms do specific ideas, tools, structures, practices, etc. flow between sites and what is the relevance of particular places and sedimented histories?
• RQ: Comparisons: How does the OWS and broader occupy movement around the world relate to previous experiences in the global justice movement (with respect to tools/platforms/techniques/organization/practices/discourses, etc.)? What are the similarities and differences?

Participation & Movement Building

• RQ: Participation. Who is participating? Even just descriptive stats interesting (age, gender, race/ethnicity, SES, etc). Also, at different levels of participation (key organizer/ camper / came to a march or two / produced media / observer at a distance, just shared or retweeted / etc)
• RQ: Participation: How are occupiers reaching out to wider constuencies? What specific tools, media, discourses, practices, are being employed?
• RQ: Movement building. How are connections being made (or not) across movements, sector, race, class, ethnicity, gender, etc.? How might these connections be facilitated?
• RQ: (for participants) 'What brought you here?' (how did people hear about events, decide to participate) [might be linked to 3rd question in the history area]
• RQ: What new lessons or perspectives on political participation, dialoge and debate are individuals involved in the various Occupy locations learning? How have their attitudes shifted about political action and engagement as a result of participation in the Occupy movement?

History

• RQ: What is the history of 'the people's mic?' A People's History of the People's Mic. (Used at jail solidarity in Seattle 1999, earlier?)
• RQ: Early on, OWS organizers cited Tahrir and Acampamento (Spain) movements as inspiration for the long-term camp as protest tactic. Are there additional links / how deep are they / are there organizers from those spaces participating in OWS?
• RQ: What are the personal histories of those who initiated and became actively involved in coordinating / facilitating roles at each Occupy site? What are the similarities and differences of these histories at each site? What lessons have these individuals brought with them from previous organizing, movement, collaboration, community-based experiences? [could be part of the 4th research question in the participation & movement building area]

critical ethnic/queer studies

• Critiques within and around the Occupy movements. How do histories of settler colonialism challenge the radicalism of 'Occupation' and/or expose its faultlines? http://t.co/4JmVgyDe
• How does the idea of occupation intersect with histories of colonial oppression and struggle on different national and differently racialized grounds?
• How can we learn from intersectional methodologies like queer of color critique in approaching the movements?
• What is the "racial project" (Omi & Winant, 1994) of the occupy movement(s)? How is this constituted, in words, tactics, images, and audio-visual texts?
• How do raced and gendered images and audio-visual texts inhibit or facilitate participation by women and people of color, on the ground and online?
• What is the relationship between race, gender, space, and participation? How is participation facilitated or inhibited for women, racialized and queer communities by the emphasis of the occupy movement on the inhabitation of urban space vs. virtual, online participation?
• What is the genealogy of images and audio-visual texts of the occupy movement(s)? What are the translocal genealogies? And can they be traced temporally and spatially, to people of color movements in the U.S., "Third World" decolonial movements, queer and feminist movements, to contemporary transnational sites of revolution?

Media ecology

• RQ: Censorship. Some protesters have made repeated claims about censorship of OWS links and tags. One instance (Yahoo mail) was confirmed, most likely due to automated spam filter. What, if any, truth is there to claims of censorship, how do we (would we) know, and what mechanisms exist to rectify (automated/algorithmic) censorship of political speech? (start off w/summary from discussion on berkman fellows list re: tools and strategies for checking this).
• RQ: Media ecologies/flows. Can we map/track the spread of OWS from social media, into blogs, into mass media (vice-versa: Henry Jenkins' team interested in this, popular media => OWS)? What key events/media texts / personal connections/ other factors produce 'jumps' of OWS across platforms and into broader attention?
• RQ: (for journalists) 'Why/Why not choose to cover OWS?' Choose particular frames? etc.
• RQ: How does increased access to technological tools affect information flows and strategies emerging from protest movements? Secondary RQs: What effects does the social network built between area institutions and residents who are donating bandwidth have on the character and impact of the movement? How can we develop and distribute "good neighbor" policies for situations like this which inform participants about privacy concerns and also about appropriate use of bandwidth?

Tools and Techniques

• RQ: Tools/platforms/techniques. Is there anything interesting to say/learn about the affordances of particular tools and techniques chosen by OWS participants? For example: the "People's Microphone," livestream.com/globalrevolution, the kickstarter project to create a printed newsletter/broadsheet, realtime projection of live feeds in multiple camps. f2f techniques: hand signals, 'progressive stack,' etc.
• RQ: Tools/platforms/techniques: how are specific (multi-) media platforms being used and what influence do different tools (twitter, facebook, listserves, livestream, websites, etc.) have for particular forms of communication, coordination, organizing, etc.? How are particular tools being used together (or not) in different assemblages? For example, what does it mean to primarily communicate/organize via twitter vs. a listserv, etc.? Distributed participation via tumblr - http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/ - thinking about how this provides venue for those who cannot physically attend for various reasons (jobs, illness, etc.), plus the multimedia rhetoric of these images (eye contact, obscuring of the face, telling of personal narrative).
• RQ: Tools/platforms/techniques: How does the use of certain decision-making processes affect OWS (participatory democratic decision-making)? For example, working groups operate in consensus fashion (using 75%) and bring proposals forward to the general assemby (GA) that acts as the decision-making body for the various occupations. The GAs also operate on consensus and follow specific procedures that are explained every night. These procedures are followed pretty closely, which could work to exclude some (those who don't understand the process) while it could also develop a collective identity for those who do. As Bill regularly reminds his class, democracy can be a long series of endless meetings. What are the overall affects of the GA and consensus process to the movement?

Counter movements

• The responses to and interaction between OWS and those expressing disapproval of OWS could provide an interesting focus. Through twitter, trolling, and direct responses to OWS/ 99% materials, like the I am the 53% tumblr. (See analysis of 99% tumblr in ref). The relationship to the Tea Party, #tcot on twitter etc and the occasions where individuals/tea party groups are expressing alliance/understanding or rejection of OWS movement might also be worth analysing as the movement develops. On observation how to these groups interact, use each others tactics and forms and to what outcomes?NY Times article added to references aboce which sort fo starts this but a robust research into the creation and expressions of these sites could be illuminating!

Visual Culture/Critical Visual Studies

• What is the scope of the images and audio-visual media texts being produced, of the movement and by the movement?
• What are the contexts and processes of production of those images and audio-visual texts?
• Within the movement, is the process of producing images and audio-visual media texts an instantiation of collective action?
• How are images and audio-visual media texts being distributed by the movement(s)? How is their online distribution an augmentation of on the ground organizing strategies? Is the process of distribution an instantiation of collective action?
• What are the routes and pathways of images and audio-visual media texts across media platforms? (This resonates with questions in first section re: jumps/ecologies...) How are images and audio-visual media texts repurposed online, and for what purposes? How do localities intersect with these pathways? What are the nodes, what are the networks?
• How are images and audio-visual texts, on the ground and online, inhibiting or facilitating participation?
• How do images and audio-visual texts constitute a "visual dialogue" (Doerr, 2010) amongst diverse participants and transnational activist communities?

MOAR

• RQ: What is the architecture of different Occupy camps? How do they structure their spaces and how is this different from those of everyday life?
• RQ: What lessons from other national/temporal contexts have been "overlearned" by and misapplied to modern American protests? Does OWS consciously avoid certain techniques that have worked in the past? [for example?]
• What is the effect of different encampments on the surrounding neighborhoods and businesses? The media in Oakland have been portraying the OO as financially harmful to local downtown businesses, in part due to comments made by a Chamber of Commerce Rep. Are his statements accurate?

Capital Research

Research on the 1%, the multinational corporations that impact Occupy, locally and globally, because they are making the profits and privatizing the safety net, at the expense of the 99%. This is more like traditional corporate campaign research done by unions and labor advocates. This is research that can help to inform the movement, not just to study it.

• Who are large corporate entities present in local Occupy and global ones?
• Are there common corporate targets?
• How is money moved between Occupy cities by corporations?
• How can Occupy cities coordinate actions to target certain corporations (i.e. consumer boycott, direct action, etc.)?