Organizing Occupy Wall Street

This is Just Practice

Author: Marisa Holmes Series: Alternatives and Futures: Cultures, Practices, Activism and Utopias

Marisa Holmes, an organizer of OWS in New York City, aims to fill this gap by deriving the theory from the practice and analyzing a broad range of original primary sources, from collective statements, structure documents, meeting minutes, and live tweets, to hundreds of hours of footage from the OWS Media Working Group archive.

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Critic Reviews

“The book is very successful in conveying the urgency of OWS and similar movements in the 2011 wave of the ‘movements of the squares’. member. ... Holmes’ book serves as an important reminder that there is still light in the dark, showing that these movements can be a wellspring of democratic inspiration at a time when liberal representative democracy is in deep crisis.” (Anastasia Kavada, Social Movement Studies, February 28, 2024)

“Marisa Holmes is an organizer and educator from Brooklyn, New York. Her book Organizing Occupy Wall Street (Palgrave, 2023) is part personal testimony, memoir and critical analysis of this epic social movement and its immediate aftermath. She also made a documentary with the OWS Media Working Group called All Day All Week – An Occupy Wall Street Story. The subtitle is an interesting one: This is Just Practice. … Holmes dives deep into the New York practices.” (Maia Ramnath, The Institute of Network Cultures, networkcultures.org, December 18, 2023)

“Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a two-month occupation of Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan in 2011. … Throughout the book one gets the sense that what occupiers most wanted from the experience was a sense of community. … I found a lot of new words and new ideas in this book. The ref‐ erences for each chapter are at the end of each chapter. At the end of the book is an index and a glossary.” (Jo Freeman, H-Net Reviews, h-net.org, December, 2023)

About the Author

Marisa Holmes is an organizer, filmmaker, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the director of two non-fiction feature films, All Day All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story, which captures the occupation at Zuccotti Park, and After the Revolution, a non-linear narrative of the post-2011 context in North Africa. In addition, she has authored numerous short films and articles. Her work has appeared in Truthout, Paris-Luttes, Nawaat, PBS, and Al Jazeera, and We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation. Currently, she teaches courses on social movements and media at Rutgers University and Fordham University.

Back Cover

This book is the first study of the processes and structures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, written from the perspective of a core organizer who was involved from the inception to the end. While much has been written on OWS, few books have focused on how the movement was organized. Marisa Holmes, an organizer of OWS in New York City, aims to fill this gap by deriving the theory from the practice and analyzing a broad range of original primary sources, from collective statements, structure documents, meeting minutes, and live tweets, to hundreds of hours of footage from the OWS Media Working Group archive. In doing so, she reveals how the movement was organized in practice, which experiments were most successful, and what future generations can learn. Marisa Holmes is an organizer, filmmaker, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the director of two non-fiction feature films, All Day All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story , which captures the occupation at Zuccotti Park, and After the Revolution , a non-linear narrative of the post-2011 context in North Africa. In addition, she has authored numerous short films and articles. Her work has appeared in Truthout, Paris-Luttes, Nawaat, PBS, and Al Jazeera, and We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation . Currently, she teaches courses on social movements and media at Rutgers University and Fordham University.