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Contribution short abstract

How does radical imagination take shape in the practices of activist groups? How do past radical imaginaries shape contemporary collective action of activist movements? Taking the 2024 student occupation at Ghent University as a starting point, this presentation delves into these questions.

Contribution long abstract

In the spring of 2024, universities around the world witnessed the largest wave of student mobilization in generations. Students organized in opposition to their universities’ complicity in sustaining ties with settler-colonial and Zionist institutions amid accelerating genocidal violence in Palestine. In Ghent, students occupied their campus for 40 days, calling not only for an academic boycott in solidarity with Palestine but also for stronger climate-justice measures at their university. Although this encampment is frequently depicted as a “successful” or exemplary case, largely because the university became the first to formally commit to cutting ties, an equally important dimension is exactly the cross-struggle solidarity coalition building between anti-colonial and climate justice movements. Which political imaginaries underpinned the emergence of this coalition? What frictions or ambiguities surfaced as these imaginaries interacted? And what stories to more abundant futures were transmitted through them?

In this poster-presentation, my central aim is to reflect on the (im)possibilities to keep the radical imagination and practices of activists alive through the lens of counter-archives. Archives play a crucial role in this regard as they are not passive repositories of memory but active spaces that construct future imagined realities of past events. The empirical data draws on participant observation in combination with semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with the different actors involved in the 2024 UGent encampment and its archiving process. As a researcher, my positionality is shaped by both my involvement in the UGent occupation and my current research work examining the archiving of activist movements.