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

Last year, a group of SOAS students in London occupied the
offices of senior management in their university in support
of a wave of strikes by university staff. In 2015, students
and staff at Wits University in Johannesburg occupied their
administration building in response to an increase in tuition
fees as part of the Fees Must Fall protest movement. Both
forms of resistance used occupations as a tactic to create
conditions against the neoliberal education system in crisis.
My PhD will examine the prefigurative potential of student
occupations as a socio-political but also spatial, temporal,
affective and relational intervention.
Using a dialogical engagement with the occupation in
Johannesburg and London, my research works to explore
the ways student occupations can break open the
configuration of the neoliberal university and imagine,
rehearse and actualize social life otherwise, beyond our
present 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 interdisciplinary
theoretical framework of anti-capitalist theory, affect
theory and utopian studies, black feminism, abolition and
queer theory and will conduct mixed-methods qualitative
research via archival research and feel tanks