University students across the US have been protesting since 7 October 2023 with vigils, rallies and marches asking for a ceasefire in Gaza and for their universities to divest from Israel. While some of these protests led to heated fights about foreign policy, the most prominent events have involved university presidents’ abysmal congressional testimony. This week’s arrests of more than 100 Columbia students reinvigorated the student movement and now it’s kicking off everywhere.
As a sociologist of social movements, I study how movements select and shift tactics to elicit a response from their opponents. Over the next few weeks, we will see dozens of other university encampments spring up because activists have found a tactic that gets the administration’s attention at a critical time: during finals and commencement.
In 2011, I was an organizer at Occupy LA and ended up writing my dissertation about distributed networked social movements. The Occupy movement’s growth was aided by social media, then an emerging technology popular with young people, and the invention of the smartphone, capable of using apps and streaming video.
With the global wave of Occupy protests, the mobile phone was converted into a political tool imbued with the powers of narrative and broadcast. Occupy protesters were not able to control the narrative about the movement, but they certainly could share their own reality and invite other social media users to do so too.
Every person with a smartphone who entered these Occupy encampments behaved like a journalist, documenting everything they saw. Some even defined themselves as “citizen journalists” and formed ad hoc network of streamers across the globe. Activists became micro-celebrities online and some were able to make money by broadcasting live, monologuing about everything they were seeing.
But, what kicked off Occupy’s popularity was not their messaging about the economic crisis, it was viral clips of police abuse and suppression.
In late September 2011, all eyes turned to Occupy NYC, located in Zuccotti Park, as a clip circulated on Twitter of a group of young women getting pepper-sprayed by the NYPD. Alongside the video was the hashtag #OPpigroast, urging the online crowd to identify the officer behind the violence. A photographer had taken a picture of that same cop earlier in the day, with his name tag visible. Digital sleuths, known collectively as anonymous, got to work, unearthing everything they could find about him, his family and his employer.
For the final months of 2011, I visited a number of Occupy encampments and interviewed hundreds of protesters about what inspired them to get involved. Many recalled this video of police violence which made them sympathize with the protesters. Several interviewees remarked that they initially had come to “witness” what was happening at their local encampment and then stayed for various reasons, including believing in the movement’s message, meeting new people, and finding a role they could take on.
Since then, I’ve studied many other movements and noted, like other social movement scholars, a chilling pattern between state violence and movement participation. For example, Indigenous activists have organized for environmental issues for decades, but the general public only became aware of what was going down in Standing Rock after Democracy Now shared footage of protesters being attacked by officers with guard dogs and pepper spray.
That catalyzed several hundred solidarity protests across the US and Canada under the name #NoDAPL. The civil rights movement’s lunch counter sit-ins, Bloody Sunday in Selma and the freedom rides, culminated in media coverage of police violence. Even the spread of the Occupy movement was inspired by state violence against protesters in Tahrir Square.
Media mobilizes movements, so coverage of police repression of peaceful protest is often met with more protests. At times, the protest itself may morph to become focused on the immediate issue at hand: the state’s use of violence as a means to punish without due process and deter future activism.
For today’s anti-war protesters, they have all the infrastructure they need to broadcast a narrative about their beliefs directly to a global village. Individually, they’ve been practicing for this moment for years by becoming accustomed to using their phones as political tools. While the Occupy movement and advances in technology inspired new journalists to publish lots of raw and unfiltered content in 2011, generation Z was born in it and are more digitally savvy than any group before. In many respects, the youth of today have a ready-made infrastructure to shift control and buckle institutions, but the key will be for students to sustain the pressure to ensure they meet their goals. It’s hypocritical for universities to be bastions of knowledge and guardians of free inquiry, who then will not disclose certain relationships with donors; including corporations and governments.
Today’s student protesters struggled to find a tactic that could escalate their grievances to the upper echelons of the administration, where students – and even most staff and faculty – often have no insight. Critically, students picked a critical time as administrators want the grounds to look as pristine as possible with commencement coming up. While all tactics eventually expire as the opposition learns to counter the moves of the protesters, student protesters have the upper hand now. If students can find a way to build momentum throughout the summer months, it’s possible this issue will be a major factor in November’s election.
The aftermath at Columbia University should be instructive for other universities facing similar protests, the repression and suspension of students leads to more sustained protest and broader participation. More students join in, if only just to witness. By suspending so many students, they now have very little to keep them from organizing and drawing attention to the encampments popping up across the US. Activist tactics are mimicked, like memes: when they hit, they resonate, but the effect can be short-lived unless it gets remixed.
There is some truth to the popular protest slogan: “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”
Joan Donovan is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media Studies in the College of Communications at Boston University.
