The Students Give Us Hope: Pro-Palestine Encampments as Prefigurative Infrastructure

In the spring of 2024, the Student Intifada, the name given to a four month stretch of student encampments in solidarity with Palestine, gripped national attention. This attention ultimately told an incomplete story of these events. One that not only detached them spatially and historically, but one which made their narratives much less complex and intriguing. These events were marked by both their quintessential spatiality, and also their immense diversity. In this paper, I treat these camps as a set of decentralized experiments. This first takes form as understanding them as a city, and then as sets of prefigurative infrastructures. To do this analysis I employ a variety of mapping techniques. Rather than attempting to reclose the realm of possibilities which follows this analysis, I focus on two case studies. By using this framework, the temporal and spatial boundaries of the spring of 2024 are disrupted and a much longer story can be told.