Where is the Color in Occupy? Race, Class and Gender in the Occupy Movement

Speaker

Description
When a Canadian magazine, Adbusters, issued the call last summer to Occupy Wall Street, no one could predict the response that would follow.  Many have pointed to the lack of race-explicit analysis by the Occupy movement and the domination of white middle class participation.  Organizers of color involved with Occupy discuss how race is manifested in their city and how Occupy can lead with a race-explicit analysis.

30th June – Convergence on Activism & Research Ethics

Occupy Research Collective Convergence (ORCC): Activism & Research Ethics

10:00-17:00 Saturday June 30th – Pearson Building, University College London, Bloomsbury, London, WC1E 6BT (enter from Gower Street).
See here for directions.

Are you researching Occupy or contemporary social movements?
Are you involved in Occupy or other forms of activism?
Are you interested in using research to take action towards creating other possible worlds?
Are you keen on research which respects activism?

This one day convergence will focus on the ethics of researching within-and-beyond the Occupy movement. We would like this to be the beginning of an ongoing conversation about the ways in which research can complement, inform, challenge and present social movements and radical politics.

This convergence aims to provide an open space in which to share ideas about the ethics of Occupy, activism and research. The agenda is fluid and will be finalised collectively at the start of the day, but themes might include:

The ethics of Occupy and the role of critique in activism.
Activism & institutional relationships; within and against the neoliberal university.
Consensually researching consensus-based movements; research for/research about; approaching (re)presentation.
Participatory methodology; research dissemination and freedom of access; radical publishing; militant research; collaboration and mutual aid in research.

This Convergence is being organised by the Occupy Research Collective. We are an open network of activist-researchers working within and around the Occupy movement. We aim to bring together a broad variety of research and researchers, from students and academics, to social and community researchers working outside academia, to unofficial researchers – anyone interested in thinking and doing research for the sake of activism, knowledge or other purposes. We want to experiment with alternative, collective ways of doing, disseminating and collaborating on research and publishing, helping to counter the increasing neoliberalisation of the university and research environment, and finding new ways to support each other as radical researchers.

In the meantime please join the email list (below) to start sharing and discussing readings. If you have any questions, you can contact us:

By email: occupyresearchcollective@fastmail.co.uk
At our website: http://occupyresearchcollective.wordpress.com
And by joining our mailing list, at: http://groups.google.com/group/reading-occupy

Please distribute this call out widely through your friends, colleagues, activist networks, or university (ask your school admin to forward it to all students!).

Sasha Costanza-Chock from MIT’s Center for Civic Media and Christine Schweidler from DataCenter will be presenting on the Occupy Research Network at re:publica in Berlin this week. Check out the panel description below, or jump directly to the conference schedule.

Occupy Research: Research by & for Social Movements

Knowledge can be used to build and maintain, as well as to upset, power! Chris will discuss the open Occupy Research network, research justice as a framework, and plans for the future and the critical role of this work in building more powerful social movements. Sasha will propose a shift away from platform-centric analysis of the relationship between social movements and the media towards the concept of social movement media culture: the set of tools, skills, social practices, and norms that movement participants deploy to create, circulate, curate, and amplify movement media across all available platforms. Both will share key insights based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, visual research in multiple Occupy sites, and participation in Occupy Hackathons, as well as the Occupy Research General Demographic and Political Participation Survey (ORGS), a database of the characteristics of approximately 1200 local Occupy sites, and a dataset of more than 13 million tweets with Occupy related hashtags.

#OccupyData Hackathon 2: Data Visualization for the 99%!

OccupyResearch, DataCenter, R-Shief.org, and the MIT Center for Civic Media are excited to announce OccupyData Hackathon Round II! Join us at the locations below or organize your own.

When: March 23-24, 2012

Where: Cambridge | Los Angeles | San Francisco | Oakland | Utrech | NYC | CyBeRspace | irc.lc.freenode/occupydata | SIGN UP HERE:  http://bit.ly/occupydatavizmarchhackathon | *ADD YOUR LOCATION*

What:

#OccupyData Hackathon 1 brought you visualizations of 13 million occupy tweets (see summaries by OccupyResearch, R-Shief, Fast Company, and Utrecht University). People participated from Utrech, LA, Boston, NY, and Spain.

#OccupyData Hackathon 2 builds on the demos and tools from the first round, and turns our collaborative energy on visualizing the 5000+ responses to the OccupyResearch General Demographics and Participation Survey (ORGS), R-Shief Twitter #occupy tags aggregated since September 2011, and Occupy Oakland Serves the People survey, as well as other datasets people might want to explore. This event is not only for hackers or coders, but for anyone who’s interested. Bring your ideas, skills, creativity, questions and critical perspectives as we explore occupy datasets using free and open source tools and software. We’ll make connections from one place to another – open to all participants! The model is for people to arrange local venues for f2f meetups, work locally, and share/collaborate real time via skype/chat/twitter/google docs and etherpads, etc. If you can’t make it to one of the physical locations, you can still join in remotely.

How: Sign up here to a particular location! Or organize a local space and add it to the list.

Location Details: http://bit.ly/occupydatavizmarchhackathon

More info and coordination: http://bit.ly/occupyhackathon

Saturday, March 17, 2012, Noon-2PM! Join us in NYC
Left Forum Conference, Room E310 on the Pace University campus, NYC
Conference Panel Announcement

Join us for a critical discussion of social movement research and research justice for movement building, in the context of the Occupy Movement.

Knowledge can be used to build and maintain, as well as to upset, power. Scholars and activists on the Left are working with the 99% to develop participatory research and include a broader base in the process of forming research questions, choosing methods, developing research tools, gathering, analyzing, and disseminating results.

People are doing occupy research to:

• understand engagement with the movement, who is participating in Occupy, who is not participating, and why;
• challenge race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability and other inequalities reproduced in the occupy movement;
• share ideas, strategies, and tactics;
• provide research and analysis for the 99%;
• spread research skills, tools, and methods more broadly throughout the 99%

We are scholars, movement researchers, and activists working with and as Occupiers around the country and transnationally to develop research projects including: surveys of visitors to occupywallst.org and occupytogether.org; a general survey in multiple locations and across borders; analysis of occupy as a racial project (see occupyresearch.net for more info). We will discuss occupy research as a network to support movement research, what open research processes and methods can look like, and the critical role this work can play in supporting movement building. We’ll share (and invite attendees to share) findings to date, and some of the work ahead.

Panel coordinators:

• Christine Schweidler, Director of Strategic Initiatives, DataCenter (datacenter.org) & OccupyResearch
• Hector R. Cordero-Guzman, Ph.D., Professor, School of Public Affairs, Baruch College of CUNY
• Martha Fuentes-Bautista, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
• Sasha Costanza-Chock, Assistant Professor of Civic Media, MIT & OccupyResearch
• Yvonne Yen Liu, Senior Researcher, Applied Research Center & Occupy Oakland Research Working Group

Join us for this panel: http://bit.ly/orleftforumpanel2012
Learn more about this amazing conference space: http://www.leftforum.org/
Register: http://bit.ly/lfregister2012
Join event on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/events/311405165580416/  

Occupy Research – Research by and for the Movement

This panel focuses on theoretical and practical developments around social movement research and research justice in the context of the Occupy Movement. Knowledge can be used to build and maintain, as well as to upset, power. Scholars and activists on the Left are working with the 99% to develop participatory research and include a broader base in the process of forming research questions, choosing methods, developing research tools, gathering, analyzing, and disseminating results. People are doing occupy research to:

* understand engagement with the movement, who is participating in Occupy, who is not participating, and why;

* challenge race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability and other inequalities reproduced in the occupy movement;

* share ideas, strategies, and tactics;

* provide research and analysis to target the 1%;

* spread research skills, tools, and methods more broadly throughout the 99%

Panelists include scholars, movement researchers, and activists working with and as Occupiers around the country and transnationally to develop research projects including: surveys of visitors to occupywallst.org and occupytogether.org; a general survey in multiple locations and across borders; analysis of occupy as a racial project (see occupyresearch.net for more info). Panelists will discuss their research processes and methods, findings to date, plans for the future and the critical role of this work.

For more panels on Occupy at Left Forum see http://www.leftforum.org/content/occupy-debates-track-critiques-dialogues-and-questions-about-occupations