Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement

New Internationalist Publications Ltd. My Account About Contact.

You have no items in your shopping basket. Fiction Non-Fiction Food and Drink. Magazines Music CDs Downloads. The Ethical Sock Shop. Soil Association Packaging Gifts.

1. Dreaming in public : building the Occupy movement in SearchWorks catalog.
2. Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement!
3. Julia, Coming Home (Remington Series Book 1)?

For Teens and Adults. Friends of the Earth Christmas Cards. War on Want Christmas Cards. MS Society Christmas Cards. Ethical Gifts for the Young. Ethical Socks and Slippers. See other products by New Internationalist Values and cause: Overview Quick Overview Among the growing range of books on the Occupy movement Dreaming in Public will stand out for one simple reason. Ethical Gifts for the Young.

Quick Overview

Ethical Socks and Slippers. See other products by New Internationalist Values and cause: Overview Quick Overview Among the growing range of books on the Occupy movement Dreaming in Public will stand out for one simple reason. It is of the movement, not about it. Download the free sample: A stunningly comprehensive compilation of materials, from public statements to engaged reportage, essays focused on analysis and strategy, and documentation of the visual culture of the movement. About the Editors Amy Lang: Amy Schrager Lang taught U. Activist, author, artist and theater producer.

This is a book that is both revealing and energizing. Sign up to get Ethical Shop news, offers and more!

Ordering from a nearby New Internationalist shop may save you money on postage. We seek to rediscover and reclaim the world … What do we want from Wall Street? Nothing, because it has nothing to offer us. It is sustaining the phantoms and ghosts we have always known and whose significance we now understand.

We have come here to vanish those ghosts; to assert our real selves and lives; to build genuine relationships with each other and the world; and to remind ourselves that another path is possible. If the phantoms of Wall Street are confused by our presence in their dream, so much the better. It is time that the unreal be exposed for what it is. As a movement, it spread to over one hundred cities across the United States usually with encampments in city squares.

The movement had an anti-capitalist nature, it was leaderless, with a horizontal organization, held open public general assemblies and attracted people from all walks of life, age range, race, gender, and ethnicity. In this article I want to explore the ways in which OWS opened a new public sphere that served as a site of public pedagogy.

In other words, I am attempting to make the political pedagogical and the pedagogical political.

Hyped up by Hollywood, it resonates with images of wealth, greed and gluttony, lack of moral rules, and a distorted notion of success. It is interesting to note that the site where OWS protesters initially demonstrated was soon closed down and fenced at the request of the private company that owned the space. On the one hand the conservative, corporate, individualistic sphere with a focus on success, self-interest, individual responsibility, wealth and power through exclusion; and on the other, the active, collective action focusing on the common interest and social responsibility, and making claims to the right to work, the right to public health and education.

The Occupy movement came at a time when politics appeared to be somewhat removed from our civic lives and the practices of human societies, or it had become so vilified in the public discourse, that it seemed almost heretic for anyone to try to advocate its importance—not to mention its revitalization—and to reclaim a terrain for its existence and evolvement. How have people who were involved in Occupy moved from a position of inertia, apathy and disenchantment to a subjectivity position, where they intervened in important and meaningful ways in the public sphere?

• Additional info.
• For Her Heart (incubus, dubcon, vampire, werewolf) (Making Her Mine Book 4).
• Account Options?
• God Where Is My Boaz: A womans guide to understanding whats hindering her from receiving the love and man she deserves (Christian Dating Series Book 1).
• Leaning On A Lamp Post.

How did they manage to connect their private troubles with public issues? In other words, what marks the passage to a subjectivity position in a context like the one taking shape in OWS? In the context of this paper I will not venture into exploring the reasons behind Occupy, but I will rather ask the critical questions behind it. In the case of Occupy, clearly those involved engaged to one degree or another in questioning their reality, its discourses and its practices and this is the first step towards re-politicizing politics and assuming a sense of agency. On the other side of the fence, corporate America and conservatives thrived on the depoliticization of politics promoting a conservative agenda that made participation in collective decisionmaking irrelevant, shrinking the public sphere, reinforcing individuality over the collective, and creating an illusion of participation in affairs that have already been decided by others.

From this discussion, it becomes clear that public spheres are highly political and should aim at human self-governance and at freeing people from the logic of the market.



Occupy movements as public spheres were a major blow to depoliticization to the degree that they have challenged anti-democratic, authoritarian and conservative narratives, that included a frontal assault on labor rights, social services and welfare provisions, and produced a people-generated counter theory that will be discussed in the last section of this paper. Public spheres always beg the question of human agency, since they are par excellence sites for its exercise.

In this context the question of ethical responsibility emerges to the degree that individuals concerned with public affairs move to a subject position where they become actors in the construction of their own realities. Occupy as Public Pedagogy. The most exciting aspect of the Occupy movement is the construction of the linkages that are taking place all over.

If they can be sustained and expanded, Occupy can lead to dedicated efforts to set society on a more humane course.



1. Panayota Gounari, "The Polis Is Oneself": The "Occupy" Movement as a Site of Public Pedagogy.
2. Dreaming in Public - Building the Occupy Movement.
3. Product Information.
4. Dreaming in Public - Building the Occupy Movement - The Ethical Shop?
5. From Geordie Land to No Mans Land.
6. Dreaming in Public - Building the Occupy Movement (Paperback)!

These linkages were deeply pedagogical in that they have possibly shaped new types of collective consciousness and ways to intervene in the world. Giroux is worth quoting at length here: Such a notion of democratic public life is engaged in both questioning itself and preventing that questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished.