Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a university in the Turkish capital, this paper examines how queer students endure authoritarian repression after prefigurative protest ends, tracing how affect, vulnerability, and everyday presence sustain political subjectivity beyond mobilisation.

Paper long abstract

Following the repression and gradual demobilisation of large-scale student protests against state intervention at a university in the Turkish capital, many students described the movement as “having ended.” Yet the existing power structures remained challenged in the practices of the everyday. Addressing a gap in resistance studies where limited attention has been paid to what happens after mobilisation subsides and how the afterlife of prefigurative protest continues to shape political subjectivities (Theodosopoulos, 2014), this paper examines how political life is sustained following an almost year-long occupation of campus space.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2024, the paper traces how resistance persists through affective practices of endurance among queer students, who became primary targets of state homophobia (Özbay, 2021) alongside the authoritarian intervention on the university. Confronted with invisibilisation and erasure, queer students mobilise the very vulnerability that exposed them as targets (Butler, 2016), reclaiming their queerness by continuing to inhabit the university as queer subjects. While collective occupation was no longer possible, the encounters, solidarities, and political imaginaries forged during protest persisted through friendships and everyday practices of care.

Engaging this afterlife of mobilisation through Asef Bayat’s notion of a politics of presence, the paper argues that resistance under authoritarianism cannot be reduced to mobilisation or articulated demands. By foregrounding the aftermath of protest as a distinct ethnographic problem and political condition, the paper contributes to debates on affect, resistance, and authoritarian governance, while positioning queer students as key theorists of political life within the contemporary university.