![A man photographs a black lives matter protest happening behind him](https://ash.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Top-Events-2024-roundup-25-500x333.png)
Podcast
Episode 5: Independent Protest Journalism
Host Jay Ulfelder sits down with journalists Talia Jane, Raven, and Sean Beckner-Carmitchel to discuss the impact of independent journalism on protest activity and social movements.
Commentary
Over the past few weeks, the burst of pro-Palestine protests, rallies, demonstrations, vigils, and direct actions in the U.S. that followed Hamas’ October 7th attacks on Israel and Israel’s military response to them has swelled into a sustained wave that is almost certainly broader and larger than any previous pro-Palestine protest wave in U.S. history.
Over the past few weeks, the burst of pro-Palestine protests, rallies, demonstrations, vigils, and direct actions in the U.S. that followed Hamas’ October 7th attacks on Israel and Israel’s military response to them has swelled into a sustained wave that is almost certainly broader and larger than any previous pro-Palestine protest wave in U.S. history. As Jeremy Pressman and I noted in our recent interview with Good Authority, by late October, the current wave had already surpassed its 2021 analogue in size and spread, and the ensuing 10 days have only brought more and larger actions across many more localities.
Since October 7, Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) has recorded more than 950 pro-Palestine protest events in 317 different cities and town across 48 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Across the 609 (64%) of those events for which we have information about the number of participants, our total estimated crowd size is about 520,000, with a median crowd size of 150 and maximum of 160,000 in Washington, DC, on Saturday, November 4 (per our usual practice, we arrive at that 160,000 figure by averaging the lowest reported size, “tens of thousands”, which we conservatively treat as 20,000, and the highest, “an estimated 300,000”).
The stack of charts below summarizes our protest event data by week to identify trends in the growth and evolution of this mobilizational wave. The weeks used in this summarization run from Monday to Sunday, so Week 1 is actually just two days, October 7–8. The final week, Week 5, ends yesterday, November 5. Among the notable trends in those charts, and bearing in mind that data for the most recent week are subject to the most change as we see additional events:
What the charts don’t show but you can see in reporting from these events is how diverse the crowds have been across all sorts of dimensions, especially as Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has dragged on and calls for a ceasefire have grown louder. Movements rarely achieve this kind of breadth and diversity, and the ones that do often have more durable effects on policy and attitudes.
For more information about CCC and access to the most recent public compilation of our data, please visit our GitHub repository.
Podcast
Host Jay Ulfelder sits down with journalists Talia Jane, Raven, and Sean Beckner-Carmitchel to discuss the impact of independent journalism on protest activity and social movements.
Podcast
Host Jay Ulfelder sits down with Joseph Brown, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, to discuss a mass mobilization in Atlanta to stop a new a police training center amid environmental and community rights concerns.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium data show more than 3,700 days with pro-Palestinian protest activity at over 500 U.S. schools since October 7, 2023, including encampments at more than 130 of them.
Podcast
Host Jay Ulfelder sits down with journalists Talia Jane, Raven, and Sean Beckner-Carmitchel to discuss the impact of independent journalism on protest activity and social movements.
Podcast
Host Jay Ulfelder sits down with Joseph Brown, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, to discuss a mass mobilization in Atlanta to stop a new a police training center amid environmental and community rights concerns.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium data show more than 3,700 days with pro-Palestinian protest activity at over 500 U.S. schools since October 7, 2023, including encampments at more than 130 of them.