Description
This paper approaches the Gaza solidarity encampment as a political formation in the context of the university, through the lens of heterotopia. In the paper, we examine the fraught politics of solidarity within and beyond Gaza solidarity encampments. We explore the networks and practices of solidarity through which the encampment organised itself, and the university executive board’s response to those practices, to show how the encampment mirrored and inverted the university’s official missions of student and civic engagement. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic research at the Newcastle Gaza Solidarity Encampment between May and July 2024, we show how the encampment became a struggle over the university itself, where encampment participants and the executive board imagined and aimed to realise dissonant imaginaries of the university through drawing strict boundaries around legitimacy of participation, right to the campus space, relationship with local solidarity networks, and the securitisation of students themselves. Further, we approach the encampment itself as a heterotopic space, composed of different people with diverse affiliations, relationships and materials, that shape its internal politics of solidarity, activism, and survival. Through this paper, we aim to show how the politics of solidarity is limited by, and transgresses the neoliberal university, and the wider securitisation of dissent.
