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Contribution short abstract

This paper examines how student-led liberation movements in Dutch universities challenge narratives of institutional crisis and reform. It explores how strategies of generative refusal challenge institutional co-optation, creating “pockets of possibility” for alternative ways of being and relating.

Contribution long abstract

This paper examines how student-led liberation movements in Dutch universities challenge dominant narratives of institutional crisis and reform amidst a period of sweeping austerity measures and increasing campus securitization. Drawing on Savannah Shange’s (2019) concept of "carceral progressivism,” I explore how critiques of systemic injustice are absorbed by the university, repurposed as tools for institutional self-preservation, and weaponized against radical demands for structural change under the guise of inclusion. Far from conservative, the university turns out to be a "continuously complexly mutating entity” (Mbembe 2016, 32) where reforms succeed not despite, but through their collusion with disciplinary logics.

Drawing on ethnographic research with student-led liberation movements on campus, however, I highlight how carceral progressivism will always be "a formation on the move, vulnerable to encounter with its radical Other” (Shange 2019, 143). I explore how strategies of "generative refusal" (Simpson 2014) challenge the university’s co-optation of critical frameworks, advocating instead for a reimagining of knowledge- and subject-formation that transcends the academy’s onto-epistemological limits. Rather than repairing existing institutions as part of a linear, inevitable evolution toward ever greater forms of inclusion and universalism, these student movements invite us into space of relationality and world-making that exists beneath and beyond the institution’s reach. Ethnographically tracing these "pockets of possibility” within-against-beyond the university, I argue for a decoloniality that moves beyond reformist approaches, instead embracing abolitionist practices that dismantle harmful structures while nurturing possibilities for alternative ways of being and relating.