OWS

The Occupy movement’s strength is its theatrics, argues Todd Gitlin, author of Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street, on the Possible Futures blog of the Social Science Research Council.

The “anarchist post-punk core” of Occupy has been more about expression than mission from its start, writes Gitlin, a professor of sociology and journalism at Columbia University. Thus, the play that took place on May Day was a natural expression of Occupy’s spirit:

Occupy, in other words, is primarily an identity movement, and identity movements face inward. They aspire to be cultures, self-sufficient and gorgeous. People don’t join Occupy, they do it. It’s a way of life, a transvaluation of values. Joining in such a life is, to a few tens of thousands of people nationwide, an intense form of disaffiliating from the main currents of American society and culture. It means not only disaffection from plutocratic control but making oneself at home with the movement’s own solidarity.

TSP and other social scientific sources are swimming in great information about the Occupy Wall Street movement, so be sure to check out some of these additional sources and add your own favorites in the comments!

• “On ‘Camping’ and the Framing of Occupy Movement Strategies, Sociological Images
• “Occupy Wall Street Demographics,” Graphic Sociology
• “Occupy What?,” Sociology Lens
• “Understanding ‘Occupy,'” Contexts

Columbia University was going to offer a course on Occupy Wall Street this spring, the New York Post and others reported last week—but it looks like that announcement was premature.

The anthropology class at Columbia was to be called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement.” However, administrators said the course didn’t go through the necessary faculty approval process in order to be offered this spring, according to Bwog, the blog of Columbia University’s monthly undergraduate magazine, The Blue and White. Hence, the course is no longer listed among the department’s offerings for the semester starting Jan. 17.

Students at NYU, though, will be able to get credit for studying the movement in an undergraduate course in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, taught by Professor Lisa Duggan.

“Occupy Wall Street has done us all the service of illuminating [the fact] that the economy operates within the framework of political, social and cultural conflicts, and not outside them,” Duggan told Washington Square News, NYU’s daily student newspaper.

The university will also offer a graduate course on OWS with Professor of Sociology Jeff Goodwin.

The Occupy Wall Street protests are in full swing across the nation, and reporters are doing their best to navigate and explain the growing, and sometimes ambiguous, movement. Not surprisingly, sociologists are helping journalists make sense of the phenomenon for viewers and readers. To help shed light on the Occupy Boston protests, FOX 25 Boston turned to Tufts University sociology professor Sarah Sobieraj. In a relatively short TV interview, Sobieraj was asked to cover a lot of territory, including explaining reasons for the movement’s popularity, addressing the breadth of its message, and identifying connections to other famous American protests.

These are all topics Sobieraj should feel pretty comfortable speaking on—after all, she wrote the book on media and protest (Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism). However, she isn’t the only academic with something to say about the Occupy protests. For instance, CUNY professor Héctor Cordero-Guzmán was asked by OWS itself to analyze the characteristics of occupywallst.org visitors and saw his results picked up by The New Yorker’s Rational Irrationality blog, while Columbia’s Todd Gitlin wrote about the difference between Tea Party and OWS protests in the New York Times and discussed the movement with National Public Radio’s Marketplace. These scholars are working as ambassadors for the discipline and proving to the broader public that sociological research can be timely and relevant for parsing current events. Let us know if you spot any particularly edifying articles in your daily news review.