Rooted in Love and Solidarity: Student Encampments for a Popular University
“In the fall academic semester of 2023, universities across the nation saw a swell of student encampments asking for a divestment of university funds from Israel and its military operations
(Reeve, 2023). These encampments have incited arrests of students, faculty, and community members; violent brawls between protesters and masked counter-protesters; cancellations of university graduations for the COVID-19 generation who did not get to experience their high school graduation either—and yet these encampments have also created on-campus teach-ins, opportunities for students and administrators to learn from another, and for the building of campus communities which extend beyond the classroom and school-sanctioned clubs. These protests invited students, faculty, alumni, and community members to sit-in together, learn from one another, and weave their roots deep into the soil of a university that they cared for so deeply that they would risk being arrested in order to see their university divest funds for the sake of humanity. This paper shares the autoethnographic lens of one researcher from one campus (Butler-Kisber, 2010), and specifically one teach-in which used Newspaper Theatre (Boal, 2006) to support students in (re)writing the version of their experiences as they lived them.”