“Walls of Seeing”: Protest Surveillance, Embodied Boundaries, and Counter-Surveillance at Occupy Sydney
Abstract
In mid-November in Sydney Australia, after a thousands-strong rally between Town Hall and Martin Place in Sydney, several hundred Occupy Sydney protestors assembled at a new site in Hyde Park. During this ‘rally to re-Occupy Sydney’, police were highly motivated to prevent protestors from staying overnight and setting up permanent camp once more in the city centre. Large numbers of New South Wales Riot Police formed a perimeter around the protest site, engaging in a number of intimidation tactics, including heavy surveillance. For this exploratory essay into the themes of surveillance and counter-surveillance, I interviewed two participants who were present on that particular night, as well as drawing on my own experiences. I describe the tactics and activities of the police in this case, as well as the reactions of protestors to these tactics. My focus is on the tactics of counter-surveillance used by protest participants.
Author Biography
Frances Shaw
Frances Shaw is a Research Assistant at the University of Sydney in the Department of Media and Communications. She has recently completed her doctoral research at UNSW, which focused on the political significance of feminist discourse in Australian blog networks. She has presented her research in multiple disciplinary contexts, including communication studies, gender studies, Internet studies, and political science. Her research interests include discursive politics and online social movements. She is currently researching memes as political communication, as well as working on a project with Gerard Goggin researching Australia’s Internet histories through a case study of Bulletin Board Systems in the late 1980s through to the mid 1990s.