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Article published In: Occupy Hong Kong: Historicizing Protest
Edited by John Flowerdew and Rodney H. Jones
[Journal of Language and Politics 15:5] 2016
► pp. 567–588

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Evidentiary video and “Professional Vision” in the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

 | University of Reading
 | University of Bath
Published online: 6 December 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.15.5.04jon
Abstract
The video documentation of police violence against citizens, and the circulation of these videos over mainstream and social media, has played an important part in many contemporary social movements, from the Black Lives Matter Movement in the U.S. to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Such videos serve as both evidence of police abuses and discursive artefacts around which viewers build bodies of shared knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about events through engaging in exercises of “collective seeing”. This article analyses the way a video of police officers beating a handcuffed protester, which became an important symbol of the excessive use of force by police during the Occupy Hong Kong protests, was interpreted by different communities, including journalists, protesters, anti-protest groups, and law enforcement officials, and how these collective acts of interpretation served as a means for members of these communities to display group membership and reinforce group norms and ideological values.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Evidentially and “Professional Vision”
  • 3.Background, data and methodology
  • 4.Journalistic seeing
  • 5.Activist seeing
    • 5.1Passion times
    • 5.2Salute to Hong Kong Police
  • 6.Official seeing
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (38)
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