Translocal Assemblage: Student Activism and Social Movement Learning in Pakistan

• In Event: Students, Activism and Social Movements

Proposal

The 21st century has witnessed a surge in global dissent among youth who are struggling against authoritarianism, austerity measures, privatization, gender inequalities, and climate injustice. In Pakistan, the revival of progressive student politics in recent years suggests a growing political consciousness among students in higher education. This is demonstrated by an annual student-led, nationwide rally that has been organized since 2018 to demand the restoration of student unions. Despite a four-decades long official ban on student unions, students have continued to articulate campus-based and international issues through episodic protests, initiatives, or events that expose unjust social arrangements at the institutional, local, and national level. The multidirectional crossings and dimensions of progressive student activism in Pakistan is captured by drawing on the concept of “translocal assemblage” (McFarlane, 2012; 2009), which describes the complex ways in which the exchange of activist knowledge takes place across time and space. The translocality of alternative knowledge production is studied through the lens of social movement learning to understand its interplay with different modalities of power and forms of student resistance. The article studies the case of the Progressive Students Collective (PSC), a student-led collective based in Lahore, Pakistan, to illustrate the translocality of learning in social action. Since its formation in 2016, the collective has taken a hierarchical structure, expanding to over 15 cities across the country with a diverse membership from public and private universities. Despite facing state repression in the form of intimidation, arrests, and sedition charges, the collective has maintained a strong presence on university campuses. The paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over multiple research visits to Lahore between June-August 2021 and November 2002-January 2023, with data gathered through generative conversations and interviews with student activists and field observations of the Student Solidarity March 2023, student-led study circles on university campuses, and public protest events organized by PSC.


It explicates translocality of student activism in Pakistan by illustrating the convergence of global and local forces in student activists’ socio-political imaginaries, by identifying cultural symbols in their political expression, including poetry, performance, chants, anthems and solidarity songs, and by considering the ways in which these are created, mediated, and reconstituted through specific local contexts. It does so by analyzing various examples, such as the translocal processes of discussing international decolonial, feminist, and Marxist literature in student-led study circles, and engaging with people’s histories in local-distant contexts by creating alternative learning spaces on university campuses. Another translocal dimension involves the reconceptualization of time and space as student activists draw on cultural symbols and the history of transnational struggles through poems, slogans, and anthems, and borrow and blend vocabulary from global social movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. In their political becoming, student activists position themselves in relation to these transnational discourses and make connections between the material and social, thereby opening possibilities for similar or different meaning-making to speak back to the dominant power(s) in the local context. These processes also take place through social media as student activists build cross-border solidarities, share common understandings, and disrupt unproductive binaries of difference. As they build on each other's tools of resistance, the translocality of the knowledge produced in the activist space is constantly being constructed and reconstituted through their everyday practices. Lastly, the paper examines how translocal assemblage offers a distinctive lens for understanding knowledge production in social movement learning, by highlighting the importance of actions, processes and relationships that extend beyond fixed relations and binaries. By applying a translocal assemblage analytic, the paper illustrates how activists acquire and disseminate knowledge across boundaries of time and space

Findings suggest that migration, mobility and knowledge exchange in physical and virtual spaces, shape translocal materialities for student activists. It fosters interconnectedness across various localities on both material and symbolic levels. While PSC is based in Lahore, the student activities are not situated in a fixed campus space or sites of protests. This paper argues that student activists at PSC are instituting a new socio-spatial order to allow novel possibilities and modes of resistance to emerge in higher education. There is a fluid and distributed flow of meanings, symbols, solidarities and interactions that occur in borderless spaces which are always in motion, making up the material, spatial and embodied activist experience. It is argued that dominant power(s) are contested through pedagogical processes that emerge from mobility, interactions in the physical and digital pace, and socio-spatial inter-connectedness of translocal and transnational struggles.

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Author

• Mariam Parvez Sheikh, University of Massachusetts Amherst