By Andrea Hajek, November 26th, 2012 
On 17 September 2012, Occupy Wall Street celebrated its first anniversary. In spite of the usual problems facing bottom-up political activism in the long term, on which Pamela Brown reported a few months ago, OWS is still alive and kicking. Protest is clearly ‘in’, as the global protests on 14 November 2012 also demonstrated. But social movements and political protest have also made it to the screen, as memories of protest and rebellion reverberated both at the 69th Venice Film Festival and at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, with Olivier Assayas’ movie about the French 1968 protests (Après mai), Robert Redford’s interpretation of a former Weather Underground member in The company you keep, and Shola Lynch’s documentary about the black civil rights activist Angela Davis, Free Angela & All Political Prisoners.
Characteristic of OWS as well as other recent protests across the world, notably the Arab Spring, is the role of social media and the subsequent global reach of the protests. In Why it’s Kicking off Everywhere. The New Global Revolutions (Verso, 2012), BBC Newsnight economics editor and journalist Paul Mason narrates the course of events in both the Arab world and in a number of European countries since the start of the financial crisis, and analyzes the role and impact of social media in these protests. Starting with the Tahrir Square uprisings, “a revolution planned on Facebook, organized on Twitter and broadcast to the world via YouTube,” Mason takes us back to the 2008 clashes in Greece and Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ in 2009, when the images of a dying Neda Agha-Soltan – discussed recently on this blog by Lisa Lipscomb – made it across the globe in a matter of minutes. Through citizen journalism, Neda became a “global icon” and a martyr, provoking a “thread of solidarity and collective mourning” both online and in the streets (see also Aleida and Corinna Assmann’s chapter in Memory in a Global Age).
In . . .
Read more: Social Media and Protest in the Age of Globalization
By Elzbieta Matynia, October 1st, 2010 
 Elzbieta Matynia is a historian of ideas and a sociologist of culture, with special interests in performance both in theater and beyond. She has written incisively about the making of democracy and works actively in the support of free intellectual exchange.
She, the director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies of the New School, is currently a Fulbright research scholar in Johannesburg, South Africa. We at the Center saw her off at our annual beginning of the year party, as I reported in a previous post. I asked her to periodically send us reports as she researches the tragedy of the assassination of Chris Hani, a former head of the South African Communist Party (aligned with the African National Congress) and a widely admired anti-apartheid leader seen as a potential successor to Nelson Mandela. I have just received her first impressions.
Elzbieta and I first met in her native Poland when I was studying theater, an artistic form that created cultural and social alternatives in a repressive state. It’s strange to receive her note. Now she is in the position I once was, an outsider trying to make sense of a difficult political situation. Her most recent book, Performative Democracy, is in dialogue with my most recent, The Politics of Small Things. She starts, appropriately, as Tocqueville or Montesquieu would, by setting the stage with a description of the physical environment, linking it to the hopes and fears of a country undergoing significant political challenges. – Jeff
Do you want to experience the most spectacular spring ever? Come to Johannesburg in late September: you can smell it, you can see it, and you can almost hear it. The African jasmine is in bloom, the fragrance of its star-like flowers fills every street. You can see the buds of camellias in the parks, and hear people talking about the purple-blue flowers of . . .
Read more: In South Africa: A Young Leader Ignites Passion, Controversy
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 28th, 2010 
The Tea Party has made an impact on political conversation, no matter your (or my) politics. I’ve written previously about them here.
I am quite ambivalent about the Tea Party. While I am appalled by some of the slogans and signs that have appeared in Tea Party rallies, I am convinced that this is a genuine social movement, a politically significant instance of the politics of small things, a political movement concerned with fundamental principles, engaged in a great debate about both the pressing issues of the day and the enduring problems of American political life. As a registered Democrat and as a strong supporter of President Obama and his program, I am pleased that the actions of the movement may have made the Republican landslide in the upcoming elections less momentous, as the talking heads are now speculating, although I am still concerned that the movement may have given wind to the rightward shift of public opinion. The emotional, irrational and often purposely ignorant political expression in Tea Party demonstrations is of deep concern, but I think the strong expression of fundamental political principles can and should be seriously considered and confronted. I am unsure about what the Tea Party Movement’s impact on American public life in the very near term, i.e. the midterm elections, and in the long term, i.e. in the reinvention of American political culture will be. As I have been trying to sort this all out, I am reminded of the insights of an old friend, Alberto Melucci, an Italian sociologist who presciently understood the meaning of social movements in the age of internet and mobile communications, before these new media were common.
The Theoretical Perspective of a Friend 
Alberto Melucci
In series of important books, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age, and The Tea Party Challenges ‘Business as Usual’
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