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Feeling the Movement
Feeling the Movement
What is the Movement?
Rebecca Solnit Uri Gordan
What is the Movement?
Deborah Gould Richard Ivan Jobs
Author Barriers Accelerators
Solnit
Gordon
Gould
Jobs
An Inventory of Movement
Thinking Movement
1. Feelings that move us
2. Media and Contagion
3. Transformational Encounters
Feelings that Move us
Woomera Detention Center
Woomera, Australia 2002
Woomera Dentention Centre, 2002 still from film Through the Wire by Pip Starr
“For many detainees, this is the closest they
have come to ordinary
Australians. Tears begin to flow on both sides of the
fence.”
Woomera, Australia 2002
“The sound is just as tumultuous, techno beats adding urgency to the militant hubbub, the rhythmic chants of “freedom,” passionate wailing from behind bars, and semi-official speeches, casually forceful or rigidly shrill, by those activists who briefly step aside to mark their place in History. “
-Jack Wilson
Friendship Park, San Diego – Tijuana
LATEST NEWS: Border Patrol redesigns Friendship Park with limited access and no human touch.
San Diego – Tijuana, 2009
“To engage in direct action you have to feel enough passion to put your values into practice; it is literally embodying your feelings, performing your politics.”
-John Jordan
Media & Contagion
“[an] intensification of political passion in which people with very different interests are linked together by feelings aroused and organised to saturate the most public, global issues.”
-Linda Kintz
On 8 June 1972 a South Vietnamese aircraft accidentally dropped its napalm payload on the village of Trang Bang. With her clothes on fire, Kim Phuc ran out of the village with her family to be airlifted to hospital.
Anti-Vietnam War Protest, Paris 1972
• Media act as amplifiers of affect, ideas and emotion• Affect increases rapidity of communication• Extends its reach to almost global
(Anna Gibbs)
Transformational Encounters
I took out my old boltcutterMy hands could hardly wait.I snipped towards her, she snipped to me,We both could see the common free,Oh Lily of the arc lights,A' snipping in the rain.
…Closer to the silosMy heart began to quiverWas it Lily, the fear, the cold,the base or just a shiver?
Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, 1981-1985
Occupy Ottawa, 2011
Two women who witnessed the eviction from the side lines, reflected on their experiences of the night:
Woman 2: It was really quiet at night at 3 o'clock in the morning, and there is big fat snow is like coming down, and beautiful white snow everywhere and our friends were being dragged to the snow because they are singing in the fountain like it was just so real. I was just like why. Woman 1: I was so angry. Woman 2: [The police] just stand there, and look right through you, and it felt inhumane that's what it felt like, it felt like these people weren't acting with human nature towards you. They looked at you like they didn’t care …hundreds of them standing and just looking, watching people be dragged away…
