It is difficult to capture how the world was utterly transformed since October 7, 2023. In response to Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Israel unleashed an unrelenting genocide upon Palestinians in Gaza and sought to deepen its colonial claims to Palestinian lands and lives. Approximately 42,000 Palestinians have been killed, many of them children. A study in The Lancet, however, estimates that the death toll is significantly higher, reaching 186,000 in mid-June and projected to reach 335,500 by year’s end. As we put the finishing touches on this forum, Israel seemed determined to set off a regional war by killing civilians in Lebanon, carrying out an assassination in Iran, and attacking Houthi targets in Yemen.
Many in the United States watched with horror as Israel conducted its genocidal campaign in Gaza with the support of the American political establishment. This was a genocide bankrolled by American tax dollars, facilitated by U.S. weapons manufacturers, and justified by U.S. media and politicians. Students across the country launched over 100 encampments and protests touched so many campuses as students asked why their universities’ investments and research were tied up in genocide and colonial occupation. University administrators responded to the demands of the “student intifada” by calling in riot cops to beat and arrest students and/or attempting to discipline the protesters into quiet obedience. Professors have been arrested and fired. Students have been doxxed, arrested, and suspended. Student codes and staff/faculty conduct codes have been revised. Universities have revamped their surveillance apparatuses.
The 2024 fall semester started with university administrators eager to put questions of protest in the rearview mirror or, at the very least, out of national headlines. Simultaneously, students have been working hard to keep Palestinian lives and the ongoing genocide front and center. Student activists, informed by those who came before them, understand the power of their actions, the consequences they might face, and the network of policing that is in place by the university specifically to deter their activism. Quite possibly the same activism that, if previous episodes of student movements are any indication, universities will one day commemorate.
This past summer, the Digital Collective joined those who encouraged a serious reflection on the violent administrative response to a wide range of student activism, including the experiments with teach-ins, alternative pedagogies, and the expansion of the classroom into the encampments.
The following pieces are part of a forum about student activism and how faculty, students, and community members were involved in the encampments during the Spring semester of 2024. Some pieces speak to ways that people who have long advocated for Palestinian liberation worked in this new political landscape. Others speak to how first-time activists joined, interpreted, and made sense of these encampment spaces. Some offer a hyperlocal understanding of their encampment experience, others provide global linkages. Together, they paint a brief but vivid picture of what the encampments looked like, felt like, what they generated, what they challenged, and what it meant to those involved. Many themes, lessons, and challenges emerge.
We hope that this forum fulfills multiple purposes: that it will serve as an archive, a teaching resource, and a guide for future programming that will inspire those who continue struggling for collective liberation.
7.1 // Campus Circulation & Noncirculation: Fall 2024, Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, Zach Schwartz-Weinstein
7.2 // The New Age of McCarthyism: The Challenges of Teaching About Palestine in a Post-October 7th World, Rab Shak
7.3 // Teaching The Question of Palestine: Interdisciplinary Considerations, Karam Dana, Maryam Griffin, Dan Berger, Jed Murr, Brinda Sarathy
7.4 // UCSC People’s U Reflections on Kinship, Community, and Care, Max Sárosi and Sophia Azeb
7.5 // Making Meaning of What We’ve Lost: Collective Grief, Community, and Campus Crackdowns in the Wake of the Encampment Movement, A.B.
7.6 // What My College’s Palestine Encampment Taught Me About Love, zoe ly sen
7.7 // Solidarity until Liberation against the Militarized University, Jennifer Kelly
7.8 // From New York Liberation School to Intifada University, Conor Tomás Reed
7.9 // From Central America to Palestine: The importance of solidarity and global connections The People’s University, Amy Argenal
7.10 // Sustaining Dialogue, G. Carole Woodall