Paper short abstract:

We investigate the mobilization of individuals who participated in the 2011 protests in Tel Aviv and New York. It found four emotional shifts connected to cognitive frames which enable us to read the conditions of the young, middle-class protesters and characterize their response to globalization.

Paper long abstract:

In 2011, a wave of protests spread to over 700 cities around the globe. These protests, including the protests in Tel Aviv and New York, were characterized by the participation of young, well-educated members of the middle class; the occupation of public spaces; the use of non-hierarchical decision-making processes; the use of social media; and calls to decrease inequality, move towards direct democracy, and curtail the political power of corporations. The empirical analysis of hundreds of documents from the 2011 protests in Tel Aviv and New York, including meeting minutes, in-depth interviews, and first-hand reports of the protest, allowed for the identification of mobilization processes, with a focus on processes happening at the level of individual decision-making. The research found set of four emotional shifts that interacted with framing processes in people's decision to participate in the protests. The emotional shifts characteristic of these protests were both results of, and fed into specific elements of the 2011 protests. These findings propose a relationship between emotions and frames in the process in which people decide to participate in protests. They also tell us about life in global and globalizing cities, about protest in these cities, and about understanding protests and waves of protest. These findings suggest that there is a specific politics of inequality, and that changes brought by globalization and changing technology bring not just a characteristic set of results - of patterns of winners of losers, of changes in urban life - but also characteristic responses to those patterns.