As I'm sure many of you already know, Jeff Juris is a (beloved) professor here at Northeastern. In a class a few of us are taking with him (Global Markets and Local Culture), we have been assigned to read certain excerpts of his book, Networking Futures. This ethnography follows different political movements around the world, mostly against globalization and neoliberal ideals. Acting as a participant-observer in many influential protests across the globe, Professor Juris details these movements and the impact that space has on such protests. If you haven't read it I highly suggest it, but here I will copy a paragraph in order to give an idea of what I'm talking about.
"As Foucault famously argued, surveillance and control are achieved by regulating bodies in space through the use of disciplinary technologies. Building on this insight, Allen Feldman further explains that power 'is contigent on the command of space and the command of those entities that move within politically marked spaces. The body becomes a spatial unit of power, and the distribution of these units in space constructs sites of domination' (1991, 8). Indeed, direct action involves myriad micro-level spatial battles between protesters and police. Specific tacics thus attempt to occupy space, creating forums for political and cultural expression, while the police employ their own bodily and spatial techniques to control, enclose, or disperse protesters (cf. Jansen 2001, 39). By using measured spatial, bodily, and psychological tactics during the RTS [Reclaim The Streets] action, riot cops projected power, reestablishing control of space and preventing liminoid outbursts, In this sense, violence might be aboided, but at the cost of invisibility."
(Juris 2008:149)
In his descriptions of the protests, Professor Juris goes very in depth into the meaning of the urban space in which the protests are taking place. As I read I couldn't help but think of our discussions of what space means and how it can be manipulated, so I thought I would share these thoughts on the blog. It's extremely interesting to see how space has been used in the past movements he discusses in comparison with the Occupy movement of today.
-- Jillian
Networking Futures
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DL-This sounds like a very applicable analysis to the occupy and campus movements currently going on in the US today. I also noted Hana's piece in the Huntington news that is worth reading in terms of gauging how student politics are perceived. How is power expressed through space? and when does a spatial practice - certain techniques of disciplining the body - express and create political space? The demonstration is a great example of this. What observers and participants are noting about the use of force and pepper spray on college campuses and encampments in public places is that these violent actions are less a response to immediate threats than they are a deployment of techniques designed to undo what the movements enact (symbolically).
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