The Occupy movement has spread over hundreds of cities nationwide and over 1,500 cities around the world. The movement is formed around a common goal, which is to protest the way government actions or inactions have rooted widespread discontent. The Occupy movement has encountered opposition from the cities and counties where it is located. Arrests have been made for a number of violations of city and county codes including resistance to police orders and disorderly conduct charges. In our country, freedom of speech and the right to protest have been regarded as inalienable rights. The question becomes how to balance the rights of the people involved against the rights and obligations of the government. This thesis will provide an in depth look at the issues being discussed in cases and hearings involving the Occupy movement. The key issue plaintiffs argue is that their First Amendment rights are being infringed on. In January 2012, both international human rights and United States civil liberties experts at seven law school clinics across the country met and formed the Protest and Assembly Rights Project. The project investigated the United States response to Occupy Wall Street. This thesis will discuss and recap some of their findings. In addition, it will analyze the Federal Constitutional restrictions to protestor's rights and the cases that arise on the grounds of these restrictions, as well as examine how the courts interpret the First Amendment and clarify these issues along with defining protestor's constitutional rights. Based upon the Constitutional rights and legitimate restrictions, the thesis will make appropriate recommendations on the limits for both the protestors and the local government.

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Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / L. Susan Williams / This study is about two grassroots political organizations that formed prior to the 2012 presidential election in the United States, each concerned with the nation's economy, corporate favoritism, government involvement, and growing income inequality. The study outlines an historical account of a culture of control, and then analyzes actions of two contemporary protest organizations – The Tea Party, known as politically conservative; and Occupy Wall Street (OWS), characterized as liberal – as the national election unfolded. Each group sought to change the political landscape and influence the outcome of the presidential election, but with competing messages and very different approaches. Seeking change from the inside, The Tea Party emphasized limited government regulation of the market economy. OWS intended to crumble the system by outside resistance and demanded government attention to economic inequality. Field research and content analysis provide insight into behaviors, beliefs, and actions of each group, which, in turn, identify efforts to resist the status quo. Content analysis of print news provides evidence of state responses toward each group, while also offering insight into media framing and public influence. Finally, a survey of official responses from host communities reveals specific efforts to control protest organizations, ranging from acts of diplomacy to violent opposition. Findings demonstrate how roles of the Tea Party and OWS are not always in conflict, such as media often portray; for example, both groups contested corporate control. The Tea Party met token success, but stopped short of influencing top echelons. OWS brought attention to system inequities, but failed to maintain significant pressure; instead, participants were criminalized for acts of protest. Ironically, in the end, both groups' efforts reinforced the culture of control they sought to resist. Theoretically, a cultural criminology framework, integrating symbolic interaction and social control, demonstrates how structural constraints oppose grassroots political efforts.

The thesis provides an analysis of the different ways the Occupy Wall Street was presented by OccupyWallSt.org ( the movement’s own media source), and The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today from July 2011 up to the end of June 2012. This was done by using Entman’ theory of media framing together with Castells’ network theory of power. The former provided a way of addressing the different types of frames that mainstream media utilize, while the latter offered an understanding of how power is built through the media processes. Additionally, Castells’ theory described another type of media frame which is mostly used by alternative media, the counter frame, which could successfully be applied to study the content that the social movement decided to provide about itself.The study first employs a quantitative approach by using Crawdad, a centering resonance analysis (CRA) software. This provides a reliable pool of data that was then analyzed by using the above theories. Additionally, in order to check the reliability of the qualitative conclusions, a statistical test was done for the overall top centers resulting from the CRA.

Both Sharon Hayes’s "In the Near Future" (2005-2009) and Catherine Opie’s photographs of assemblies and rallies (2007—) take protest as a topic of investigation. Hayes enacts solo protests in urban centers and documents her project’s iterations; Opie attends organized marches and demonstrations and photographs the gathered crowds. Yet while both projects perform or picture protest in the present-day, neither is wholly of this moment. In her staged actions, Hayes holds the signs and slogans of earlier social movements, and both she and Opie create and consider the images they capture in relation to experiences and visual records which predate them. This thesis considers the ways in which expectations and desires for present and future moments are rooted in understandings of social or political pasts, investigating the work of Hayes and Opie alongside the events of Occupy Wall Street and the histories of the movements these artists reference: ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Queer Nation, and the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968. Focusing on the role of the documentary image in the creation and remembrance of historical events, the paper looks at how the longing to reinhabit a pictured past becomes incorporated within a desire to feel historical, and how fantasies of the past and future are absorbed into the charged space of present. Concentrating first on this temporal rearrangement (referred to by Hayes as an “unspooling of history”) and turning next to the reengagement and embodiment of symbolic imagery, this thesis explores how works by Hayes and Opie emphasize disappointment in the present scene while simultaneously endeavoring to establish alternative spaces of social and political possibility—both new sites and reimagined worlds of belonging. / text

Anti-hegemonic social movements have historically had a complicated and conflicting relationship with mainstream media, as it consistently undermines the emancipatory potential of these grassroots revolutionary movements, hence serving the interests of the dominant social forces of the hegemonic order. This work develops a comprehensive and critical analysis of the agency of mainstream media throughout the coverage of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) to understand how and why it consciously and relentlessly worked to neutralize the true dimension of the movement and its occupations, and thus to preserve the neoliberal capitalist world order from the ideological threat and the revolutionary challenge that OWS posed to it. Employing a historical materialist approach based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony - and the emphasis in the consensual aspect of power in the production of the hegemony that it entails - and its use in the study of world orders grounded in social relations, this work aims to investigate the mainstream media's active role in the building of the current neoliberal capitalist historic bloc, and its subservience to the hegemonic social forces throughout every stage of the coverage of OWS and its occupations: from the deliberate lack of interest and the total indifference in the movement to the...

Amid the 2011 Arab Revolts, and the subsequent worldwide Occupy movement, social movement scholars faced sudden, powerful mass mobilisations without easily identifiable resources, networks, or forms of organisation underlying them. These instances of mobilisation beyond the scope of what we traditionally consider ‘the movement’ have stretched existing theories of social movements to their limits, defying both conventional theoretical frameworks and existing approaches. This work undertakes a novel analysis of mobilisation which accounts for these new, disruptive cases. It advances the concept of Affinity: a predisposition to participate in certain causes based on social or psychological traits. Alongside this concept, it outlines conditions of Convergence: emergent situations, frames and spaces which encourage those with such Affinity to temporarily participate in mass mobilisations. These two concepts are advanced and developed through a study of the 2011 Egyptian Revolt and Occupy Wall Street movement, alongside the classic case of the 1789 French Revolution. These cases are analysed in comparative perspective to develop a powerful analytical tool with which scholars can augment conventional analyses: The Affinity-Convergence Model of Mobilisation.

The Tea Party’s influence in the recent 2010 elections suggests that the group is making an impact within American politics. This project seeks to identify the cultural forces at work and ground them within Antonio Gramsci’s framework of hegemony. Taking a cue from Michael Bérubé’s recent book The Left at War, I perform a close analysis of the Tea Party’s project for hegemony. I focus on the media discourses of the Tea Party movement, performing a close reading of two key Tea Party websites and unpacking two important televised moments relating to the Tea Party’s rise as a grassroots movement. I argue that the Tea Party uses the practice of articulation to persuade the American public that Tea Party members are the rightful heirs to the project of “America” that the Founding Fathers began centuries ago by using the theories of Bérubé, Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as reference points. Finally, I use my analysis of the Tea Party’s articulatory practices to begin exploring a way forward for the American Left, building on the groundbreaking cultural work of Bérubé, Hall, and Laclau and Mouffe. / text