From Tahrir Square to Occupy, from the Red Shirts in Thailand to the Teachers in Oaxaca, protest camps are a highly visible feature of social movements' activism across the world. They are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. Drawing on over fifty different protest camps from around the world over the past fifty years, this book offers a ground-breaking and detailed investigation into protest camps from a global perspective - a story that, until now, has remained untold.
Taking the reader on a journey across different cultural, political and geographical landscapes of protest, and drawing on a wealth of original interview material, the authors demonstrate that protest camps are unique spaces in which activists can enact radical and often experiential forms of democratic politics.
Anna Feigenbaum is a lecturer in media and politics at Bournemouth University and has held fellow positions at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis and the London School of Economics and Political Science. She completed her PhD at McGill University, Montreal, in 2008, where her project was funded by a Mellon Pre-dissertation Fellowship, the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has published in a range of outlets, including South Atlantic Quarterly, ephemera, Feminist Media Studies, Fuse magazine and Corpwatch.org. She is an associate of the Higher Education Academy and is a trained facilitator and community educator, running group development workshops for academics, nongovernmental organisations and local initiatives. She can be found on Twitter at @drfigtree.
Dr Fabian Frenzel is postdoctoral Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Potsdam and lecturer in organization at the School of Management, University of Leicester. His primary research interest is in the political implications of travel, tourism and mobilities. A particular focus has been the study of social movements' and political activists' mobility. Frenzel has developed two distinct empirical research areas, the study of slum tourism and the study of protest camps in his own work and in collaboration with colleges in two vibrant research networks. He is co-author of the monograph Protest Camps (Zed Books 2013) and co-editor of the edited collections Slum Tourism, Poverty, Power, Ethics (Routledge 2012) and Geographies of Inequality (Routledge 2014). He has published widely in academic journals and also writes on current affairs in the UK and beyond for the German weekly Jungle World.
