‘It was wonderful, but it is very hard to create a city’: Spatial Practice in Political Organising: Palestinagård as a Site of Counter-Hegemonic Struggle at Lund University
(2025) TKAM02 20251Division of Ethnology
- Abstract
- A year after the establishment of the protest camp Palestinagård at Lund’s University in May 2024 and its demolishment by the authorities, the student solidarity movement is continuously engaged in endeavours to get into conversations with the institutions at Lunds University to make their demands heard, as the genocide on the Palestinian population in Gaza is still ongoing. Further, Palestinagård brought up old and new questions about power relations, democratic participation in academia, the university’s autonomy and policing at campuses. This thesis takes the author's experiences of student activism in the camp as a departure point for a recondition of the protest events at Lund’s University in spring 2024, and its aftermaths till... (More)
- A year after the establishment of the protest camp Palestinagård at Lund’s University in May 2024 and its demolishment by the authorities, the student solidarity movement is continuously engaged in endeavours to get into conversations with the institutions at Lunds University to make their demands heard, as the genocide on the Palestinian population in Gaza is still ongoing. Further, Palestinagård brought up old and new questions about power relations, democratic participation in academia, the university’s autonomy and policing at campuses. This thesis takes the author's experiences of student activism in the camp as a departure point for a recondition of the protest events at Lund’s University in spring 2024, and its aftermaths till summer 2025. Working from a positionality of reflexive militant ethnography, the study combines auto-ethnography with approaches of group history telling that include the personal accounts of 16 student protestors. The research questions central to the study’s inquiry are how collective actions of intervention produce counter-hegemonialic spaces, and what knowledge for the social movements can get produced through these. Combining Chantal Mouffe’s conception of agonistic and antagonistic relationships in democratic arenas and Henri Lefebvre’s theory of spatial production, the study aims to examine and work towards spaces of personal encounters and critical knowledge production in between academia and activism. Palestinagård was a spatial intervention of LU users for the right to intervene in order to end a potential compliance in genocide and apartheid. Produced through lived spaces, the camp’s spatiality acted positively towards its own demands, creating a space of alter-politics. Among others, activists draw learnings from organising in tactics of engaged research themselves, confrontation with oppositional parties, and the re-processing of affects and movement internal tensions. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9215553
- author
- Püttker, Lorenz LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- TKAM02 20251
- year
- 2025
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- Protest Camp, Activism, Palestine, Cultural Analysis, Ethnography, Militant Research, Critical Knowledge Production, Spatial Production, Antagonism
- language
- English
- id
- 9215553
- date added to LUP
- 2025-12-17 13:11:09
- date last changed
- 2025-12-17 13:11:12
@misc{9215553,
abstract = {{A year after the establishment of the protest camp Palestinagård at Lund’s University in May 2024 and its demolishment by the authorities, the student solidarity movement is continuously engaged in endeavours to get into conversations with the institutions at Lunds University to make their demands heard, as the genocide on the Palestinian population in Gaza is still ongoing. Further, Palestinagård brought up old and new questions about power relations, democratic participation in academia, the university’s autonomy and policing at campuses. This thesis takes the author's experiences of student activism in the camp as a departure point for a recondition of the protest events at Lund’s University in spring 2024, and its aftermaths till summer 2025. Working from a positionality of reflexive militant ethnography, the study combines auto-ethnography with approaches of group history telling that include the personal accounts of 16 student protestors. The research questions central to the study’s inquiry are how collective actions of intervention produce counter-hegemonialic spaces, and what knowledge for the social movements can get produced through these. Combining Chantal Mouffe’s conception of agonistic and antagonistic relationships in democratic arenas and Henri Lefebvre’s theory of spatial production, the study aims to examine and work towards spaces of personal encounters and critical knowledge production in between academia and activism. Palestinagård was a spatial intervention of LU users for the right to intervene in order to end a potential compliance in genocide and apartheid. Produced through lived spaces, the camp’s spatiality acted positively towards its own demands, creating a space of alter-politics. Among others, activists draw learnings from organising in tactics of engaged research themselves, confrontation with oppositional parties, and the re-processing of affects and movement internal tensions.}},
author = {{Püttker, Lorenz}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{‘It was wonderful, but it is very hard to create a city’: Spatial Practice in Political Organising: Palestinagård as a Site of Counter-Hegemonic Struggle at Lund University}},
year = {{2025}},
}