Social justice media: the case of occupy

Abstract

Using a research rubric drawn from autonomist Marxism, this article takes the Occupy movement as a case study, and examines its historical antecedents, composition of social actors, communications repertoires and strategies of social change. My findings suggest that the Occupy movement was significant, not for its contribution to political change, but for its contribution to democratic communications. Occupy represented a new watershed in social justice communications, in which the movement itself directed its own media, reducing, for a time, the dependency of social justice groups on the dominant commercial media. Using a transmedia approach, beginning with the creation of communications commons in reclaimed public space, the Occupy movement converged many different social justice groups who employed a panoply of old and new communications repertoires.