| The Occupy movement in the U.S. is primarily associated with the occupation of outdoor public space and the iconic tents of the encampments. However, a less mediatized but equally distinctive feature of the U.S. Occupy movement is the practice of participants gathering to form deliberative assemblies. As in the occupation and square movements elsewhere, the re - appropriation of public space in the U.S. became a highly influential precondition for an emergent form of public, large-group deliberation. The General Assembly (GA), a regular event at Occupy sites in which participants engaged in forms of direct democratic practice, both produced and reflected attested ideologies of horizontalism and egalitarian decision -making.;Direct participatory democracy requires elements of process that are structured and fluid, instructional as well as receptive. In the U.S., the emergent processes of the Occupy General Assembly (GA), a real-time interactive localized event which was a common and central feature across U.S. Occupy sites nationwide, were informed by historical elements of Quaker, anti-war movement, feminist movement, and anti-globalization movement practices, among others. Additionally, U.S. Occupy Facilitation Committees, responsible for agenda setting and group discussion moderation during GAs, worked to facilitate General Assemblies using process suggestions provided on international websites written by participants in related movements outside the U.S. In this way, locally emergent discursive practices were influenced by and then fed back in to ongoing global discourses and decision-making processes. This crosspollination of practice reinforced global solidarity and refined local systems of group communication. Participants developed and adapted specific embodied tools for assembly use, including hand signals and the h uman mic or people's mic, in order to facilitate a discursive praxis of egalitarianism within the context of a speech exchange system suited to a large outdoor deliberative body. |
