From Tahrir Square to Occupy, from the Red Shirts in Thailand to the Teachers in Oaxaca, protest camps are a highly visible feature of social movements' activism across the world. They are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. Drawing on over fifty different protest camps from around the world over the past fifty years, this book offers a ground-breaking and detailed investigation into protest camps from a global perspective - a story that, until now, has remained untold.
Taking the reader on a journey across different cultural, political and geographical landscapes of protest, and drawing on a wealth of original interview material, the authors demonstrate that protest camps are unique spaces in which activists can enact radical and often experiential forms of democratic politics.
Author Biography:
Anna Feigenbaum is a lecturer in media and politics at Bournemouth University and has held fellow positions at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis and the London School of Economics and Political Science. She completed her PhD at McGill University, Montreal, in 2008, where her project was funded by a Mellon Pre-dissertation Fellowship, the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has published in a range of outlets, including South Atlantic Quarterly, ephemera, Feminist Media Studies, Fuse magazine and Corpwatch.org. She is an associate of the Higher Education Academy and is a trained facilitator and community educator, running group development workshops for academics, nongovernmental organisations and local initiatives. She can be found on Twitter at @drfigtree.
Fabian Frenzel is lecturer in organisation at the School of Management, University of Leicester, and Marie Curie post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Geography, University of Potsdam, Germany. He has worked on democratic politics in Europe, Africa and Brazil, looking at issues such as alternative media, international development and climate change. His PhD thesis is from the Centre of Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Metropolitan University. He is currently working on a two-year research project funded by the EU to investigate the valorisation of areas of deprivation and poverty in tourism. His work has been published in journals such as Environment and Planning A, Tourism Geographies and Parallax. He has edited (with Ko Koens and Malte Steinbrink) Slum Tourism: Poverty, Power, Ethics, published in 2012.
Patrick McCurdy is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa, Canada and holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. His thesis on how radical social movement actors interact with media at the site of protest was selected as part of the LSE History of Thought theses. His work has been published in several journals, including the International Journal of Communication and Critical Discourse Studies. He has published two co-edited books: Mediation and Social Movements (with Bart Cammaerts and Alice Mattoni), 2013; and Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (with Benedetta Brevini and Arne Hintz), 2013. He can be found on Twitter at @pmmcc.
