On 15th October 2011, hundreds of anti-capitalist protestors assembled into a spectacular carnivalesque procession towards Paternoster Square; the heartland of London’s banking district. Beginning with Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’, this book examines Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral in relation to media spectacle. Initially focusing on arrival narratives, it asks the question: were the 15th October 2011 anti-capitalist protestors ‘hailed’ into becoming the subjects of Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral? Based on extensive ethnographic interviews and photographic data, this book demonstrates the complex ways in which Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral ‘interpolated’ (Ashcroft 2001) and subverted media spectacle. Kairos exemplifies the longue durée of the art and ethics of Occupy. The bifarious dimensions of kairos emphasise an ethics of care and devotion alongside the indeterminate possibilities of the aleatory encounter. Formulated within Marxist aleatory materialism, this book explores the momentous reality of Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral. Instantiated within an extraordinary conjuncture of conflict between capital and labour, Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral manifested formidable expressions of resistance to the disembodied ‘space of flows’; ‘timeless times’; and the ‘real virtualities’ of transnational capitalist accumulation. Empirical case studies are used to engage with the extraordinary strategies that Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral politically cultivated to address: (i) the future of print news media, The Occupied Times of London; (ii) disjunctures and disruptions within the locality of the ‘space of place’ amidst the harsh reality of neoliberal austerity measures; (iii) the harnessing of multi-modal information communication technologies as part of an imperative to unite the ‘space of place’ with an international environmental citizenship; (iv) critically mobilising market analogues and promotional media integral to the neoliberal market reform of public sector healthcare provision and, in so doing, occupying a radical riposte to the entrepreneurial self and marketized morals of neoliberalism’s homo economicus consumer citizen. In these and many other examples, this book argues that Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral exemplifies the possibilities of kairos as a condition and consequence of the politics, visual media and culture of new social movements.

A second edition of the classic introduction to arts in social movements, fully updated and now including Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and new digital and social media forms of cultural resistance The Art of Protest, first published in 2006, was hailed as an “essential” introduction to progressive social movements in the United States and praised for its “fluid writing style” and “well-informed and insightful” contribution (Choice Magazine). Now thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of T. V. Reed’s acclaimed work offers engaging accounts of ten key progressive movements in postwar America, from the African American struggle for civil rights beginning in the 1950s to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century. Reed focuses on the artistic activities of these movements as a lively way to frame progressive social change and its cultural legacies: civil rights freedom songs, the street drama of the Black Panthers, revolutionary murals of the Chicano movement, poetry in women’s movements, the American Indian Movement’s use of film and video, anti-apartheid rock music, ACT UP’s visual art, digital arts in #Occupy, Black Lives Matter rap videos, and more. Through the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic expression, Reed reveals how activism profoundly shapes popular cultural forms. For students and scholars of social change and those seeking to counter reactionary efforts to turn back the clock on social equality and justice, the new edition of The Art of Protest will be both informative and inspiring.

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to create an alternative space for people to engage with politics that is more inclusive and participatory than traditional politics. This volume focuses on the role of visual culture in a highly mediated environment and draws on case studies from Europe, Thailand, South Africa, USA, Argentina, and the Middle East in order to demonstrate how protestors use aesthetics to communicate their demands and ideas. It examines how digital media is harnessed by protestors and argues that all protest aesthetics are performative and communicative.

Still and moving images are crucial factors in contemporary political conflicts. They not only have representational, expressive or illustrative functions, but also augment and create significant events. Beyond altering states of mind, they affect bodies and often life or death is at stake. Various forms of image operations are currently performed in the contexts of war, insurgency and activism. Photographs, videos, interactive simulations and other kinds of images steer drones to their targets, train soldiers, terrorise the public, celebrate protest icons, uncover injustices, or call for help. They are often parts of complex agential networks and move across different media and cultural environments. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of the role and function of images in political life. Balancing theoretical reflections with in-depth case studies, it brings together renowned scholars and activists from different fields to offer a multifaceted critical perspective on a crucial aspect of contemporary visual culture.

In the fall of 2011, motivated by the lack of a meaningful response to the global financial crisis and a paralysis of democratic politics, a small group of protesters gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York City. The Occupy Wall Street movement would go on to inspire camps in nearly 1,500 towns and cities, all of which were ultimately forcibly evicted by police. Without illusion but with solid evidence, The Occupiers answers fundamental questions about the movement and serves as a corrective to some common myths and misconceptions on both ends of the political spectrum.

The fight for a $15 minimum wage. Nationwide teacher strikes. Bernie Sanders’s political revolution and the rise of AOC. Black Lives Matter. #MeToo. Read how the Occupy movement helped reshape American politics, culture and the groundbreaking movements to follow. "Fluidly written . . . Levitin’s enthusiasm is infectious . . . It is no exaggeration to say that Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots changed a good deal more of the landscape than Zuccotti Park’s three-quarters of an acre in New York’s financial district." —Tod Gitlin, The New York Times Book Review On the ten-year anniversary of the Occupy movement, Generation Occupy sets the historical record straight about the movement’s lasting impacts. Far from a passing phenomenon, Occupy Wall Street marked a new era of social and political transformation, reigniting the labor movement, remaking the Democratic Party and reviving a culture of protest that has put the fight for social, economic, environmental and racial justice at the forefront of a generation. The movement changed the way Americans see themselves and their role in the economy through the language of the 99 versus the 1 percent. But beyond that, in its demands for fairness and equality, Occupy reinvigorated grassroots activism, inaugurating a decade of youth-led resistance movements that have altered the social fabric, from Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock to March for Our Lives, the Global Climate Strikes and #MeToo. Bookended by the 2008 financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, Generation Occupy attempts to help us understand how we got to where we are today and how to draw on lessons from Occupy in the future.

Adsensory sign technology, which depicts the human body as both object and subject of inscriptive advertising technologies, is integral to a western capitalist insurantial financialisation of health and wellbeing. Developing further the theme of adsensory technologies of the sign, in conjunction with Daniel Bell’s theory of the codification of knowledge as an axial feature of the structuring of post-industrial society, this book explores gentrification in heterotopic post-industrial urban spaces. It brings together case studies from London’s Grenfell Tower, exploring perilous façadism refurbishment and London’s Garden Bridge project and speculative capital regeneration. These studies illustrate, empirically, the extent to which advertising adsensory technologies have become integral to the gentrification of post-industrial urban spaces. Several of the case studies engage critically with the empirical observation that, in the post-industrial urban ecology of inner-city regeneration, adsensory technologies extend avariciously into the infrastructure of neoliberal, managerialist gentrification. In addition, the book explores the forms of capital accumulation which are emerging from the integration of adsensory technology into the gentrification of post-industrial urban spaces, and examines a new form of capital accumulation in inner-city gentrification, predicated on the (de)generative integrity of adsensory financialisation.

This is a book about how to read visual images: from fine art to photography, film, television and new media. It explores how meaning is communicated by the wide variety of texts that inhabit our increasingly visual world. But, rather than simply providing set meanings to individual images, Visual Culture teaches readers how to interpret visual texts with their own eyes. While the first part of the book takes readers through differing theoretical approaches to visual analysis, the second part shifts to a medium-based analysis, connected by an underlying theme about the complex relationship between visual culture and reality. Howells and Negreiros draw together seemingly diverse methodologies, while ultimately arguing for a polysemic approach to visual analysis. The third edition of this popular book contains over fifty illustrations, for the first time in colour. Included in the revised text is a new section on images of power, fear and seduction, a new segment on video games, as well as fresh material on taste and judgement. This timely edition also offers a glossary and suggestions for further reading. Written in a clear, lively and engaging style, Visual Culture continues to be an ideal introduction for students taking courses in visual culture and communications in a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, sociology, and art and design.

Instagram is at the heart of global digital culture, having made selfies, filters and square frames an inescapable part of everyday life since it was launched in 2010. In the first book-length examination of Instagram, Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin trace how this quintessential mobile photography app has developed as a platform and a culture. They consider aspects such as the new visual social media aesthetics, the rise of Influencers and new visual economies, and the complex politics of the platform as well as examining how Instagram's users change their use of the platform over time and respond to evolving features. The book highlights the different ways Instagram is used by subcultural groups around the world, and how museums, restaurants and public spaces are striving to be 'Insta-worthy'. Far from just capturing milestones and moments, the authors argue that Instagram has altered the ways people communicate and share, while also creating new approaches to marketing, advertising, politics and the design of spaces and venues. Rich with grounded examples from across the world, from birth pictures to selfies at funerals, Instagram is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication.

Drawing on interviews, responses to questionnaires, and oral histories by U.S.