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

去年，伦敦的一群SOAS学生占领了他们大学高级管理人员的办公室，以支持大学员工的罢工浪潮。2015年，约翰内斯堡Wits大学的学生和工作人员占领了他们的行政大楼，以回应学费上涨，这是“学费必须下降”抗议运动的一部分。这两种形式的抵抗都将占领作为一种策略来创造条件，以对抗处于危机中的新自由主义教育体系。我的博士学位将研究学生职业作为社会政治以及空间、时间、情感和关系干预的预示潜力。通过与约翰内斯堡和伦敦的占领对话，我的研究工作是探索学生占领如何打破新自由主义大学的结构，想象、排练和实现社会生活，超越我们目前对可能的感觉。将学生运动、教育的新自由主义化和预示性政治的学术研究联系在一起，本研究以反资本主义理论、影响理论和乌托邦研究、黑人女权主义、废奴主义和酷儿理论等更广泛的跨学科理论框架为基础，并将通过档案研究和感觉库进行混合方法的定性研究

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