Occupy the university - from London to Johannesburg: Reconfiguring the neoliberal university via prefigurative student movements

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Last year, a group of SOAS students in London occupied theoffices of senior management in their university in supportof a wave of strikes by university staff. In 2015, studentsand staff at Wits University in Johannesburg occupied theiradministration building in response to an increase in tuitionfees as part of the Fees Must Fall protest movement. Bothforms of resistance used occupations as a tactic to createconditions against the neoliberal education system in crisis.My PhD will examine the prefigurative potential of studentoccupations as a socio-political but also spatial, temporal,affective and relational intervention.Using a dialogical engagement with the occupation inJohannesburg and London, my research works to explorethe ways student occupations can break open theconfiguration of the neoliberal university and imagine,rehearse and actualize social life otherwise, beyond ourpresent sense of what is possible.Linking together the scholarship on student movements,the neoliberalisation of education and prefigurative politics,this study is underpinned by a broader interdisciplinarytheoretical framework of anti-capitalist theory, affecttheory and utopian studies, black feminism, abolition andqueer theory and will conduct mixed-methods qualitativeresearch via archival research and feel tanks