Grad students offer on-the-ground reporting from Occupy Oakland

Reportage on Occupy Oakland’s fluid and multifaceted Nov. 2 protests included on-the-ground updates from several Berkeley grad students.

Grad students Aaron Bady and Amina Waheed

Journalism student Amina Waheed ’13 reported live from downtown Oakland for MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.”

A multimedia reporter and an aspiring documentary filmmaker, Waheed grew up in a U.S. oil-town in Saudi Arabia and later moved to the Midwest as an Indian-Canadian immigrant. She has done media work on Chicago’s South side and recently gathered footage in the southwest for a feature film on the financial and foreclosure crisis.

Waheed’s live report for MSNBC can be found online, starting at 1 minute.

Also on Wednesday, Aaron Bady, a doctoral student in English, took part in the general strike called by Occupy Oakland, including a march to the city’s port. Bady details the large, peaceful action and describes the “overwhelming” emotions he experienced as he joined the port action on his bicycle. “A hundred or so bicyclists riding around in circles,” he writes, “a hundred fragile little steel and aluminum frames of muscle and blood standing between enormous container trucks and their destinations.”

“I remember … fighting tears while trying to describe to my partner over the phone,” he says, “what it looked like to watch this crowd come over the overpass into the port.”

Bady was later interviewed by the BBC. His extensive post, along with photos, appears on his blog, zunguzungu.