In the past year, student encampments have re-emerged as powerful sites of protest against Israel’s regime of colonization, occupation, and apartheid in Palestine, as well as the complicit silence of Western universities and governments that provide support for Israel’s war crimes and genocide in Gaza. Moreover, student encampments have been an extraordinary laboratory for commoning practices and student-led critical pedagogies. This course will provide a space to critically reflect on the historical events of the past year, examining their impact on higher education, academic freedom, and critical thinking.
However, more than an archival study of encampments, we will strategically shift our focus and attention to the decades-long ongoing struggles in Palestinian refugee camps. Palestinian camps have been spaces of resistance against Israel’s negation of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba. Emerging at the end of the 1940s as humanitarian spaces, over the following decades they became sites of political urbanity in exile, where new social and political structures were created outside the state system. Despite their differences, refugee camps and student encampments are temporary spaces where the world is reassembled in new configurations. Although both emerge from moments of crisis and are often dominated by an expiration date, they reveal the power of people coming together in the struggle for justice and equality.
The course welcomes participants eager to critically and collaboratively explore the spatial, social, and political dimensions of various forms of encampments. The program will be structured as a combination of online sessions and three in-person gatherings, fall, winter and spring.
