The Rush to Archive Occupy | The Nation
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In late December, more than a half-dozen major museums and organizations, including the Smithsonian Institution and the New York Historical Society, announced they would begin collecting materials produced by the Occupy movement.
The timing seemed odd. Here was a movement in its infancy—not yet four months old—that is still very much ongoing. For example, sixty-eight people were just arrested in Zuccotti Park during a New Year’s protest.
Naturally, the desire to preserve Occupy makes sense. The camps were temporary and any items left from their time are now precious relics any history enthusiast would be eager to examine. But the rush to archive, preserve and endlessly study the Occupy Wall Street movement perhaps also reflects America’s thirst for a grassroots protest, and the belief that any such movement is, by its very nature, extremely temporary.
NYU and Columbia University have both announced they will offer courses on the nascent movement.
Offered by [Columbia’s] Anthropology Department, the course [pdf], called “Occupy the Field,” will offer “training in ethnographic research methods alongside a critical exploration of the conjunctural issues in the Occupy movement: Wall Street, finance capital, and inequality; political strategies, property and public space, and the question of anarchy; and genealogies of the contemporary moment in global social movements.”
Time reports:
[NYU’s] “Cultures and Economies: Why Occupy Wall Street?” lists goals as wide-ranging and frenetic as the protests themselves. According to the class description, students will focus on “economic inequality and financial greed” around the globe. Alright, that’s a honed-in goal —but they’ll examine those in the context of “race, class, gender, sexuality, region, religion and other factors.” It’s a mission statement as diverse as the demands of the actual protesters.
The fact that major education institutions are now hurrying to tailor their curriculum to accommodate an Occupy world is remarkable. Here are universities that normally study protest movements as archaic events — something poor people of color did way back in the day. Once there was a lady named Rosa, and so on.
It’s curious to witness the archival process of a movement that may be merely the opening salvo of a great cultural shift in America. The process of collecting the scraps of Liberty Park has a sense of finality to it. Once there was something called Occupy…
The desire to dissect OWS may reflect the modern era in which everything and all things are consumed at a frantic pace. Sure, Occupy just got off the ground, and is constantly evolving, but the want for information about the movement is overwhelming. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the archiving Occupy might also be a byproduct of Americans’ limited ability to imagine the possibilities of a serious protest movement.
No one, including those of us who have been following Occupy since its first day, truly understands its power. As such, every day of Occupy seems like it might be the last day, which has led countless publications to tirelessly declare the End Of Occupy seemingly every day since September 17.
After all, major protest movements happen in Tunisia, or Egypt or Libya, but not in America. Whatever minor blip occurred in some parks has come and gone and now it’s time to reflect on what the hell happened. That reflection, by the way, is a great thing, and universities and museums should be applauded for recognizing the majorness of OWS.
Moving forward, it will be interesting to see how Generation Meme handles an ongoing protest movement of Occupy’s magnitude. Barely four months in, Occupy is beginning to lose its shininess and the Smithsonian is hurrying after it with a broom and evidence bag. At least OWS has the luxury of being a protest movement in America, so by its very nature, every action is new and thrilling because it’s someone doing something instead of sitting on the couch.
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Comments
Hey Happy#2, Now you are blaming Obama for kids in this country being poor??? You really are a peice of work aren't you, I wanted to write something else but never mind. This trejectory to the bottom was your fault, you and the other rightwing nutjobs who helped elect even more nutjobs, you know, Reagan, Bush, Bush, hell, even Clinton, although I didn't realize what an ass he was until he was out of office. It really does all come out eventually, and for you to accuse Obama of being the reason children live in poverty, is not only the height of arrogance, but hypocrisy. When I see and read your tripe, it makes me sick, your a lying, creepy, mental midget, and I hope someday to see you get your ass handed back to you, the sooner the better.
Many With New College Degree Find the Job Market Humbling
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: May 18, 2011
The individual stories are familiar....
Employment rates for new college graduates have fallen sharply in the last two years....What’s more, only half of the jobs landed by these new graduates even require a college degree, reviving debates about whether higher education is “worth it” after all.
....Kyle Bishop, 23, a 2009 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh who has spent the last two years waiting tables, delivering beer, working at a bookstore and entering data. “It’s more about luck than anything else.”
....Among the members of the class of 2010, just 56 percent had held at least one job by this spring.....That compares with 90 percent of graduates from the classes of 2006 and 2007....
Meanwhile, college graduates are having trouble paying off student loan debt, which is at a median of $20,000 for graduates of classes 2006 to 2010.
.....Mr. Bishop, the Pittsburgh graduate, said...he hopes to be in publishing or writing....adding that right now his student loan debt was over $70,000....
===
Question for the many Mr, Bishops: IF you had to borrow a huge part of your college costs, why didn't you pick a field with very high probability of employment with good pay? Didn't you know several years ago that "publishing or writing" were dying fields?
Has Zero, the most `intellectual', smartest of smart POTUS solved any problems? I report, you decide:
It’s the Math, Stupid!: Seven Devastating Facts About 2012
by Wynton Hall
As we enter 2012, the presidential candidates would do well to wrap their minds and messages around these seven mathematical facts:
Every day, the U.S. government takes in $6 billion and spends $10 billion. This means that every day the federal government spends $4 billion more dollars than it has.
The real unemployment rate is a jaw-dropping 11 percent.
Every fifth man you pass on your way to work is now out of work.
College graduates are now 34% less likely to find a job under Obama than they were under President George W. Bush.
Every seventh person you pass on the sidewalk now relies on food stamps.
The ravages of the Obama economy now mean that more Americans live under the federal poverty line than at any time in U.S. history since records have been kept.
Under President Barack Obama, every fifth child in America now lives in poverty.
These are not partisan jabs, manufactured statistics, or ideological swipes. These are mathematical facts....
Occupy looks like a durable good!
Scanned thru a few Occupy sites this AM and I see a decentralized infrastructure building. This suggests to me that the action will continue and build.
Take a look at:
Interoccupy -- linking strategy and tactics across the country:
http://interoccupy.org/
A wiki for researching the Occupy Movement:
http://occupyresearch.wikispaces.com/
a media archive
http://occupyarchive.org/
My local Occupy web site for Occupy Santa Rosa
http://www.occupysantarosa.org/
by: 2HAPPY at 01/02/2012 @ 10:01am...
--taught to actually solve problems, get things done--
ROTFALOL... and you voted for BUSH?;^)
The BS meter is pegged again, 2H...
davej1s at 01/02/2012 @ 9:44am...
One way, or another...
Nature gets the right of way.
'Liberal arts' or Business administration... we're all in... and our nascent ability to use foresight carries with it a moral responsibility to nurture gaia... and as it is no coincidence that gaia supports us...
It is in our best interest as a species, not as a consumer base, to be aware of our repercussions.
dave, folks like me, schooled in the math and sciences, are taught to actually solve problems, get things done, or creatively think of (ie invent) things/systems to improve the human condition and life's enjoyment.....
Thinking is heavily part of what we do and NOT the only thing dreamy Liberals do. Oh, Libs try to put their "thinking" to practice but we all know how they usually turn out, don't we?
What next? War on Poverty?
posted by: davej1s at 01/02/2012 @ 12:44pm
...A liberal arts education teaches you to think...
==
Our Gubbers are filled, at/near the top and regardless of which party dominate, are filled with "liberal arts education" types....and I guess it's just me that think it has a lot to do with over 70% of the country thinking we're headed the wrong way, huh?
Winning is sweet!
Notice how neither dave nor ttr refuted the Inconvenient Fact of no demand for the `new' course nor of an Education Bubble!
by: 2HAPPY at 01/02/2012 @ 12:12pm...
You look at the results of Bush... and cry Obama's name in vain... in the wilderness.
The Occupy movement invites you to reconsider.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8CibAuvZM4
As always 2Happy is wrong and I am only too happy to point it out. A liberal arts education teaches you to think...well, maybe not 2Happy, that may be an unrealistic goal; but 2 has Faux News to help him think. America used to be all about looking at our problems from all angles and welcoming new ideas. Now, we are expected to goose-step in some approved fashion...we should all think like 2Happy and act like 2Happy and just be too happy with a repressive corptocracy. Most Americans are not threatened by free thought, sadly "2" is.
Want to place a bet on when the first "Occupation Studies" PhD program is announced? And how long after that when the first batch of new graduates bemoans the fact that they have student loans and can't seem to find work in "the field"?
AK: ".....major education institutions are now hurrying to tailor their curriculum to accommodate an Occupy world is remarkable."
Not really!
More and more folks are now realizing the huge problem of our Academai....filled with liberal faculties teaching mostly worthless topics.
There is NO DEMAND for Columbia's "Occupy the Field," nor NYU's “Cultures and Economies: Why Occupy Wall Street?” These are concocted by under-worked, over-paid liberal faculties and their buddies in the even more bloated admin. departments of their universities!
There is an Education Bubble in this country......remember something President Zero has been the first in? Besides the most Food Stamp recepients, the most Debt, the US credit downgrade????? College Student Debts now exceed ALL consumer credit card debt!!
When something can NOT continue, it won't! Time for bringing out the butcher knives in chopping university budgets and put a microscope to what actually make its `products' useful and employable in the world of 7 Billion human beings!
an Occupy Channel
http://vimeo.com/channels/271670
I've thought of the consumer nation many times with the way it has been handled as you have mentioned. Information is handled just like products. We get it today and move onto something else tomorrow. It is amazing and scary in my mind how we have moved so much in this direction. The headlines and news coverage to everything else has giving me the feeling that the movement had its moment and now it is time to move on. That is not my feeling nor is it my hope. I think it has just started and will actually be the reforming of this nation if not the world. However, when it comes to many in the nation that watch and listen to mainstream news alone, I think they see it as already over. Now many hope it is not too but the structure has been laid by the MSM. The future will only tell what happens now.
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Colleges have been offering this sort of drivel since the 60s even at relatively conservative schools like Va Tech. That is where I learned in Honors Seminar that over population would cause mass world starvation by the 80s. Nothing changes and these efforts do not succeed.