Occupy Response

In Oakland, where I live, and at UC Berkeley, where I teach, Occupy has been defiant, fractious, exhausting, exhilarating.The zone of possibilities it promised was threatened by ruthlessly violent state and administrative pushback and the repressive criminalization of dissent.Cops wielding batons, rubber bullets, and pepper spray: these are searing images.But other scenes persist-a port closed by thousands of anti-capitalist demonstrators; tents set afloat in sly compliance of a campus "no encampment" decree.Which imaginings do we privilege?One Occupy Oakland poster placed DREAM OF THINGS THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN BUT SOMEDAY WILL BE above a large blank space, extending an invitation for you to fill its void.Here I take my cue from that multivocal, open-ended impulse.Instead of using this special issue as my own platform, I asked two Berkeley students-an undergraduate and a Ph.D. candidate, both feminists, art historians, and activists involved in Occupy Oakland and Occupy Cal-to share these pages

Art, Politics, and Modernism · Critical Theory and Political Philosophy · Digital Education and Society · Materials Science