“Protest camps are a unique phenomenon among types of demonstration. They often have no specific end point and evolve in response to a particular social or economic problem,” explains Dr Feigenbaum. “However, despite the sudden rise in protest camps across the world over the last few years, they are not a new form of demonstration. Our research has shown that protest camps have occurred all over the world and at multiple points in human history.”
Dr Feigenbaum’s interest in protest camps stemmed from a PhD dissertation exploring creative resistance and technology used during the Greenham Common protest camp in the 1980s. Through chance meetings with Dr Fabian Frenzel who was studying European protest camps and Dr Patrick McCurdy who was working on the 2005 G8 protests at Gleneagles, a new research collaboration emerged. This led to the publication of ‘Protest Camps´ – a book exploring the media, governance and social practices of over 50 protest camps over the span of 50 years.
With the advent of the Occupy movement and Arab uprisings, their research gained huge amounts of interest as people tried to make sense of events occurring across the globe. As Dr Feigenbaum says, “Suddenly the Occupy movement and protest camps became household terms and everybody wanted to know more about them. The research carried out by our collaboration added a unique voice as we were able to put current events into historical and political context.”
Looking to the future, Dr Feigenbaum’s work has already led to new avenues of research, as her interests have now turned to exploring the rise in the riot control market (funded by the Wellcome Trust). “Instead of responding to the underlying reason behind protests, governments often rely on riot control to deal with what they perceive to be the problem. It casts the police in the role of the ‘enemy’, but just as protest camps are not a new phenomenon neither are the means of disrupting them,” says Dr Feigenbaum. “Since the 1930s, tear gas has been used as means of dispersing protest camps. In early advertisements, it was even marketed as a way to ‘break the spirit’. It is almost an antithesis to the idea of protest camps, which are so often seen as creative spaces – spaces designed to spark new ideas and ways of thinking.”
For Dr Feigenbaum, publishing work open access is an important part of academic life, explaining: “For me, my passion for social change and education is inseparable from critical thinking and public engagement. By making research freely available, new ideas can be generated, and just as with the phenomenon of protest camps, you can never know what changes it may spark.”
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