Goldsmiths Reclaimed: Towards a Space of Freedom
Daniela Nofal
The University as Infrastructure Space
In thinking about infrastructural space, Lauren Berlant writes that its ‘objectness’, or perceived fixity, ‘is only a semblance, a seeming, a projection effect of interest in a thing we are trying to stabilize’ [1]. Stability, under neoliberalism, necessarily corresponds with profitability; that which is stable, is safe; that which is safe is profitable, and thereby warrants investment. To seek investment then is to pursue growth on the one hand, but it also implies ‘a sacrifice, undertaken for a better future.’ [2]
Today’s university, in seeking to maximise profits has forsaken what bell hooks outlines to be an ‘education as the practice of freedom’ for an education that ‘merely strives to reinforce domination’ and guarantee student obedience [3]. As we collectively witness the catastrophic unfolding of genocide in besieged Gaza, we are forced to reckon with the failure of our institutions and their deep complicity in sustaining Israel’s war machine. The academic institution has been no exception. In direct response, students on campuses across the world have been mobilised to collectively organise and speak up against the stirring silence and unwillingness of universities’ senior management teams to divest from Israel, only to be met with violent waves of suppression and censorship [4].
As part of their ensemble of gestures, universities have readily deployed terms such as ‘freedom’ and ‘decolonisation’ in a concerted effort to position themselves as radical and critical spaces for education, competing in a global education market. Yet, the clarity this moment affords us is unrivalled: not only are these performative gestures brought into the light, but their hijacking radical histories become starkly evident. Decolonisation is nothing but a metaphor, and freedom nowhere to be found [5]. This begs the question: if the academic institution itself has become predicated on the exclusion of the world’s horrors, what does this reveal about the state of education today? If, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, ‘freedom is a place’, and it is not the university, where must we go to find it? [6]
Image Credits: Goldsmiths for Palestine Flyers Occupation for a Free Palesinte
On the 20th February 2024, a group of students at Goldsmiths University, organising under the name ‘Goldsmiths for Palestine’ (G4P) occupied the Professor Stuart Hall building in a concerted effort to raise the demands for the liberation of Palestine. The demands of the students set out to expose Goldsmiths University’s senior management team’s complicity in the ongoing genocide and to demand a divestment from Israel. For the next 37 days, the occupation, which stemmed from an act of protest, morphed into a reclamation, and restructuring of the building, challenging the conventional boundaries of the university and transforming it into a vibrant site of political engagement.
With great admiration, I have watched G4P’s collective and impassioned efforts to reclaim the university, to engage in care-full acts of transforming it into a space of an education that embodies practices of freedom. Taking inspiration from this form of collective action, I go on to ask, how do spatial reconfigurations such as the student occupation of G4P play a role in reshaping institutional structures and fostering collective agency?
In her seminal book ‘For Space’ Massey writes that space ‘is the product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny’ [7]. Massey emphasises the ‘relational constructedness of things’, or in other words, the way in which identities and interrelations are co-constituted, but also the ways in which space constitutes them as well. Space, then, is not fixed; it is unpredictable, altered and shaped as we move through it. It is constantly unfolding, shaped by ‘distinct trajectories that co-exist’ [8].
Ann Cvetkovich writes that ‘affect that emerges from the way social life is felt can become the raw materials for cultural formations that are unpredictable and varied’ [9]. In confronting the unwillingness of the Senior Management Team to rethink Goldsmiths’ complicity in the genocide in Gaza, this has mobilized affect both within and beyond the confines of the university; from disgust, anger and outrage to a sense of hope that another way is possible, the ensemble of potent cognitive and emotional trajectories have become the undergirding foundation that has birthed a new set of relations that have compellingly ruptured the narrative hold of management in order to reclaim the university. ‘Not in our name’ we proclaim. Here, Kai Botsworth's concept of 'affective infrastructure' is useful, illiciting on the one hand, the way in which affect emerges as a by-product of infrastructure, and the way in which, affect when mobilised, (re)structures infrastructure on the other [10]. Importantly, the reading of the student occupation alongside these theoretical framings demonstrate that the possibility for change is never truly foreclosed, but rather, highlights the potential for our felt experiences to influence the way spaces are perceived, experienced, and reimagined.
In an effort to reimagine Goldsmiths as a place of freedom, students have gathered, assembled, and nurtured the accumulated manifestations of feelings that have emerged from histories informed by abolitionist struggles and resistance movements across the world. This emotional foundation that ‘underlies our capacity to recognize viscerally immanent possibility as we select and reselect liberatory lineages’ is what Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as ‘infrastructures of feeling’, which in turn give rise to an alternative arrangement of social relations [11]. Students, staff, and allies alike, have cultivated and nurtured an alternative space of pedagogy, community care and kinship; common areas of the building were transformed into intimate and communal teach-in spaces, where knowledge-sharing and critical discussions flourished; stairways, usually serving as mere conduits between floors, became bustling thoroughfares for communication and assembly; classrooms, typically reserved for lectures and seminars, were repurposed as sleeping quarters; and walls carried the blueprints for shared processes and collective agreements. The building was transformed into a hub for rethinking Palestine under occupation, becoming a living embodiment of resistance, resilience, and place-making.
Image Credits: Goldsmiths for Palestine - Demands that Goldsmiths Senior Management Team had initially agreed toAs of writing this essay, the Senior Management Team, which had eventually conceded to accepting the demands of G4P, has slyly backed down from their agreement with G4P. As the back-peddling on these agreements take place against a backdrop of yet another brutal attempt to restructure the university to ‘save costs’, we are reminded of the need to remain vigilant. We are reminded by Walida Imarisha that ‘to create the liberated futures we dream of, we have to go beyond the boundaries of what we are told is acceptable change; we have to go beyond what we are told is possible, because we fundamentally believe that the boundaries of reform are the boundaries of social control’ [12]. As we engage in a politics of place to negotiate the terms that govern the university, we must attune ourselves to sensing emergent trajectories from which new possibilities may arise.
Power to the students.
Free Palestine.
References
[1] Berlant, Lauren. 2016. “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(3), pp. 394
[2] Massey, Doreen. 2013. Neoliberalism has hijacked our vocabulary. The Guardian. June, 11. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/11/neoliberalism-hijacked-vocabulary [accessed 1 May 2024]
[3] hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. pp.4
[4] Pilkington, Ed. 2024. ‘Police Disband pro-Palestinain student encampments across the US’, The Guardian. 10 May 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/10/police-disband-pro-palestinian-student-encampments [accessed on 11 May 2024]
[5] Tuck, Eve & Yang, Wayne. 2012. ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), pp.1-40
[6] Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2023. Abolition Geographies: Essays Towards Liberation, edited by Bhandar, Brenna and Toscano, Alberto. London: Verso.
[7] Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage, p. 9
[8] ibid
[9] Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. Archive of Feelings. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 48
[10] Botsworth, Kai. 2023. “What is ‘affective infrastructure’?”, Dialogues in Human Geography, 13(1), pp. 54-72, 67
[11] Gilmore, Abolition Geographies, 490
[12] Imarisha, Walid. 2021 . ‘Living the Not-Yet: Walidah Imarisha in conversation with Jeanne van Heeswijk and Rachael Rakes’, in Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice. Utrecht and Cambridge, MA: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst and MIT Press. p. 26
