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 what Harney and Moten (2013) would describe as the Undercommons—a fugitive 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.