Workshop rethinking “occupations” – Duke University

Thursday – Friday, March 28-29, 2013
FHI Garage – C105, Bay 4, 1st Floor, Smith Warehouse
Franklin Humanities Institute
Duke University

During the last year a new type of political struggle has emerged in numerous places around the globe, in which activists of all kinds “occupy” public spaces, or turn private spaces public through their “occupation” for relatively long periods of time. “Occupying” has come to designate the main organizing practice of what seems to be a new type of non-governmental politic. It defines a space of action, a form of co-existence and partnership, modes of interaction with governments and media, and a basis for global collaboration. In the occupied spaces citizenship is re-imagined and re-thought, the multitudes emerge in new forms, the system under which they are ruled and governed are questioned with a long forgotten vigor, and power is both sought and challenged in new ways.

However, in this workshop we wish to think the “occupying movement” in relation to the more standard meanings of occupation, both as social role and profession that the market determines and distributes, and as a condition of rule in which the government is not accountable to the ruled population. Demonstrators in the Middle East and elsewhere carried posters saying “Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine”. The contrast is simple and straightforward, but it points to a much more complex field of relation between the visible oppression and subjugation characteristic of Palestine, where military occupation has lasted longer than any existing occupation, and the more subtle interplay of freedom and oppression demonstrated in each and every occupied public (or semi-public) square.

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