Political Education, Learning, and Artivism through Collective Action

• In Event: Beyond the National Spotlight: Denver’s Palestine Solidarity Encampments, Organizer and Decolonial Perspectives, Institutional Responses, and the Limits of Free Speech

Abstract

Despite sanctions, institutional narratives, and media that portrayed the encampment as disruptive or unsafe, this paper argues that the encampment was a formative site of education and learning - and also courageous resistance and repair. Growing scholarship examines the relationship between social movements and education (Niesz, 2018) and learning in and through social movements (Curnow and Jurow, 2021). Further, we feature zine-making as protest art, or “artivism” (Duncombe, 2016) and literacy practices of collective action. The encampment thus became a site of organizer-led informal (i.e., organizing and learning through protest and chants) and non-formal (teach-ins) education and site of resistance against institutions of formal education (Tarlau 2019; Choudry 2015). Students engaged in study on Palestine, centered knowledge and practices from indigenous and Jewish Voices for Peace perspectives, created and remixed chants, built a library, learned to negotiate and contest power structures, cared for one another, and fostered relationships with community activists. We highlight teach-ins as forms of collective learning and political education (Vossoughi, 2014), as well as zine-making in an art tent. The students developed a library full of zine resistance literature, and created their own zines to educate fellow organizers and the community at large. Zine-making allowed students to combine personal stories with data, written narratives, and art. Zines have been instrumental in social movements like the Riot Grrls of the 1990s, and the medium has potential for future movements as well. After the encampment ended, students donated the protest art to the University of Denver Libraries Special Collections and Archives, which also includes other student resistance art from the past. This presentation will share images of student resistance art and discuss the role of organizer-led education and art. Students have been the backbone of Palestine solidarity and campus-based resistance, and the education and art they create is integral to their dissent and decolonial praxis.

Choudry, A. (2015). Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Curnow, J. and Jurow, A.S. (2021) Learning in and for collective action, Journal of the Learning Sciences, 30:1, 14-26.

Duncombe, S. (2016). Does it Work?: The Æffect of Activist Art. Social Research: An International Quarterly 83(1), 115-134.

Niesz, T., Korora, A.M., Walkuski, C. B., & Foot, R.E. (2018). Social Movements and Educational Research: Toward a United Field of Scholarship. Teachers College Record, 120(3), 1-41.

Tarlau, R. (2019). Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education. New York: Oxford University Press.

Vossoughi, S. (2014). Social Analytic Artifacts Made Concrete: A Study of Learning and Political Education. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 21(4), 353–373.

Authors

• Alice Y. Taylor, University of Denver

• Elia Trucks, University of Denver