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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 362

Part of Session 141: Taking over the squares (Other abstracts in this session)

Occupy Discourse – the Co-construction of Community and Common Ground

Authors: Steinberg, R Lila
Submitted by: Steinberg, Rebecca Lila (University of California Los Angeles, United States of America)

The global Occupy movement brought together participants across the political spectrum to explore durative physical proximity along with and toward renewed, co-constructed discourses about human rights, human dignity, and the nature of fairness. The encampments themselves provided geographic spaces which enabled the necessary time-in-place for these explorations. Although some attention has been paid by mainstream media to the people’s mic (the practice of many repeating the floor-holder’s utterances, given in short phrases, so that large groups can hear what is said) as well as the use of hand signals, these have largely been as novelties, revealed only in two or three-second video and audio clips or still images.  And yet these and other emergent discourse practices are at the center of the significance of the Occupy movement. These embodied practices, situated within reclaimed quasi-autonomous space, allowed for collective and individual reevaluations of relationships between personal and political meaning. At Occupy sites, common ground (in its duel sense) was occupied, structured, restructured, and maintained.

Solidarity is built interactionally through the sequential organization of linguistic and gestural actions between dyads or larger groups (Clayman 2002). In participatory democracy, proposals take forms which are influenced by the local ecology (Mondada accepted) and renew and are renewed by it in ongoing negotiation. Each global Occupy site empowered itself to create local systems for the practice of participatory democratic deliberation. U.S. Occupy participants utilized models from international protest websites. In this way, locally emergent discursive practices were informed by and then fed back in to ongoing global practices. 

The people’s mic  not only amplifies the auditory range of an utterance, but provides group embodiment and reenactment of an individual’s utterance.  One US feature resulting from the multimodal simultaneous use of hand signals and the people’s mic is the appearance of double and possibly multiple stances realized through the body of a single participant. How does this type of distributed speakership (Goodwin 2007) influence group decision-making and collaboration, as well as consensus-forming? How does this practice reconstitute the body politic? Using conversation and discourse analytic methods, including gesture analysis with the use of video data collected at the Occupy Los Angeles site, this presentation will analyze segments of consensus-building activities and discuss how the emergent discursive practices of the Occupy movement reflect the larger themes and goals of the movement on a global scale.

References:

Clayman, S.  (2002).  Sequence and solidarity.  In E. J. Lawler, and S. R. Thye (Eds.), Advances in group processes:  Group cohesion, trust and solidarity (pp. 229-253).  Oxford: Elsevier Science.

Goodwin, C. (2007). Interactive Footing. In Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction, edited by Elizabeth Holt and Rebecca Clift. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 16-46.

Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Mondada, L. (accepted). An interactionist perspective on the ecology of linguistic practices: The situated and embodied production of talk. In Ralph Ludwig, Peter Mühlhäusler & Steve Pagel (eds.). Language ecology and language contact. Amsterdam: Benjamins.