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Nov 15th, 2023

Marisa Holmes on Organizing Occupy Wall Street

Marisa Holmes, one of the originators of Occupy Wall Street in NYC, shares her new book about how the movement was organized and—in conversation with media studies scholar Nathan Schneider—explores the lessons it holds for the future.

Homes's Organizing Occupy Wall Street is the first study of the processes and structures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, written from the perspective of a core organizer who was involved from the inception to the end. While much has been written on OWS, few books have focused on how the movement was organized. Holmes aims to fill this gap by deriving the theory from the practice and analyzing a broad range of original primary sources, from collective statements, structure documents, meeting minutes, and live tweets, to hundreds of hours of footage from the OWS Media Working Group archive. In doing so, she reveals how the movement was organized in practice, which experiments were most successful, and what future generations can learn.

Marisa Holmes is an organizer, filmmaker, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the director of two non-fiction feature films, All Day All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story, which captures the occupation at Zuccotti Park, and After the Revolution, a non-linear narrative of the post-2011 context in North Africa. In addition, she has authored numerous short films and articles. Her work has appeared in Truthout, Paris-Luttes, Nawaat, PBS, and Al Jazeera, and We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation. Currently, she teaches courses on social movements and media at Rutgers University and Fordham University.

Nathan Schneider is a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he directs the Media Enterprise Design Lab. He's written a book each on cooperative enterprise, the Occupy movement, and God, and co-edited one about the Internet.

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