Occupy narratives in Sweden and Latvia: How mainstream media tell the story of a movement

The Occupy movement, which started with a group of activists in New York, soon grew into a global movement with protesters gathering and occupying public spaces worldwide. This article provides a critical discourse analysis and examines the representation of the global as well as local expressions of the Occupy movement in Latvian and Swedish major newspapers. It shifts the lens from the financial centres to the European periphery and asks how the movement is recontextualized in Latvia and Sweden. In the analysis four main discursive strategies are identified and discussed comparatively for the two countries; nomination, predication, perspectivation and mitigation. Although the discursive strategies in both contexts are similar, the recontextualization in Latvia and Sweden reflects the distinct historical and cultural circumstance in which the mediation of the Occupy movement emerged.