What encampments for Palestine teach us about epistemic justice
by Katherine Blouin and Girish Daswani
In this post we speak about the connection between the University of Toronto (UofT), its settler colonial and corporate infrastructures, and how the university encloses “education” within the boundaries of private property and settler colonial harm — thereby reproducing epistemic injustice and violence. When we started our work through the educational blogs Everyday Orientalism and University Worlds, we wanted to examine how public-facing platforms can become loci for epistemic justice, to be reclaimed through liminal spaces of unlearning, through enabling access to alternative stories, and through deliberate acts of disruption that are necessary to create the world that we want to get to someday. And yet, these spaces (while critical of settler colonialism and systems of othering) remained open to the possibility of being ignored by the same people we were critiquing. The “OccupyUofT” movement, however, has taken that idea of an alternative university space and demonstrated to those in power how deliberate acts of disruption unfold in physical spaces within the university; how unlearning can happen with organized action, and how other possibilities of epistemic justice and care exist when students practice unlearning, or bring unlearning into practice. If within one university multiple university worlds coexist, these undergraduate students are speaking back to the systemic occlusions of settler colonialism and the neoliberal story of a university education as individualized success.
For some context: OccupyUofT’s Student’s Circle for Palestine was initiated after six months of protests and many requests for a meeting with UofT President Meric Gertler. When emails and protests were ignored, a group of students occupied Gertler’s office in Simcoe Hall until he agreed to meet with them. After that meeting, Gertler declined their demands to divest from weapons manufacturing companies that benefitted from genocide or to cut ties with Israeli institutions that were on illegally occupied land. Gertler also claimed not to know about the scholasticide in Palestine. When the Columbia University protests happened (April 17), UofT decided to fence off King’s College Circle in anticipation of what was to come. On May 2nd, students reclaimed these fences and occupied the circular field that you see on the picture below.
Looking at the map above, you can see three circles: the one in the middle is King’s College Circle (now, People’s Circle for Palestine), on the bottom left is Convocation Hall (where colonial-style graduation ceremonies are celebrated), and on the top right corner is a pavilion, which Uoft built in honour of Ziibiing (meaning ‘river’ in Anishinaabemowin), an underground waterway that flows north to south from St.Clair and Bathurst into Lake Ontario and which was a meeting place and travel route for several Indigenous peoples. This river still flows underground and sometimes rises to the surface after a heavy rainfall as reminders of its presence.
The People’s Circle for Palestine is set up on the river’s path and has become a community space for learning and care — containing several tents that house a library, a counseling center, a kitchen, and a sacred fire that is cared for by several firekeepers. It has hosted teach-ins and workshops, and has held social gatherings and religious ceremonies including Shabbat services every Friday.
The People’s Circle for Palestine has become an example of decoloniality in the face of the “decolonial performativity” of the white settler colonial University.
If epistemic violence manifests when oppressed or subaltern persons are prevented from speaking for themselves, the student encampment has become an anti-colonial (multi-religious, multi-racial, multi-national) space where epistemic violence is challenged and disrupted and made visible for all to see. It has become a space that challenges the collective histories of epistemic violence on Indigenous land that is now claimed by UofT as “private property”. On April 28th, Sandy Welsh, the vice-provost of the University of Toronto, issued a statement to remind the public that the lands and buildings at UofT are “private property” and that a student encampment was not welcome. Less than a month later, on May 24th, the university issued a trespass notice and threatened to discipline students as well as terminate the employment of supporting faculty, staff, and librarians.
The land UofT claims as “private property” was granted (some say taken through fraudulent treaties) by the British Crown. During colonial rule, the Crown simply gave Indigenous lands to universities as “educational land grants” — the land was meant to be leased or sold to pay the university’s ongoing operational expenses.
As a sign of protest (for what UofT admin was threatening to do to students), Kristen Daigle, who was designated to be the Eagle feather bearer for the Convocation ceremonies resigned. Kristen is Mushkegowuk (Cree) and a member of Constance Lake First Nation in Treaty 9 territory. In her resignation letter, she writes:
“The protection of property cannot and should not be mobilised as a tactic to prevent this political protest, because that is not the role we are playing here… many of these students have lived through a similar type of violence that we are now seeing streamed live to us every day through our phones. And here they are, putting their bodies and minds and spirits at risk. All in the name of visibility; to make us see, to make you see what is so easy to ignore. It is important to know who is showing up and who has been showing up, even before October 7th, in this resistance against the genocide of Palestinian people.”
The claim that the University is built on “private property”, and, therefore sees itself as property owner and landlord, allows it to enact colonial harm and violence upon its undergraduate students. And, yet, the People’s Circle for Palestine has demonstrated what epistemic justice and care, what anti-colonial solidarity, looks like. The same can be said of UofT’s convocation season.
Indeed, what we have seen happening this convocation season at the University is something extraordinary: Located next to the People’s Circle for Palestine, Convocation Hall has been turned into a space of transgressive pedagogy. There, the dissonance between, on the one hand, the University’s branded performances of truth, reconciliation, and edi and, on the other hand, its British, colonial, and increasingly corporatised power structure is made impossible to unsee.
The graduation ceremony at UofT takes place in a domed rotunda building called Convocation Hall. Located right next to the People’s Circle, this Pantheon-like structure, which was inaugurated in 1907, is described in a 2006 piece by UofT Magazine as “designed in the classical style of ancient Greece, echoing the historic foundations of higher learning”.
On June 3rd, UofT had yet another fence set up in front of the building entrance, seemingly as an attempt to hide the People’s Circle from the graduates and their loved ones.
Obviously, just like the fencing of King Circle’s lawn, this attempt at occlusion did not work. On the contrary.
The graduation ceremony itself is structured like a Christian mass: It starts with a golden-scepter-led procession of regalia-clad faculty who, accompanied by a pipe-organ, walk from the back of the hall to the stage. Once everyone is seated, the Chancellor and President or other high administrator filling in for them read a welcoming speech that includes a Land Acknowledgement. They then introduce the honorary speaker, who is generally a member of the local cultural scene, a donor, a member of the Governing Council or a faculty with some higher administrative role. At the end of their speech, speakers must recite some sentences in (unintellegible) Latin. Once this is done, the parade of the graduates starts. In a university shamefully nicknamed UofTears, to make it to the graduating ceremony is no small achievement. One by one, the students step to the front of the stage. There, instead of getting a eucharist, they stop for a few seconds, the time for someone stationed at a pulpit to read their name. Applause and cheers from the audience follow, as they walk to the other end of the stage, passing by the officiant, special guest and mostly White high administrators who face the applauding audience. At the end of the ceremony, the organ comes back, everyone stands up for the national anthem of Canada, and the regalia-clad guests exit in a parade. Once they are gone, the audience is allowed to mingle and leave.
Despite the overwhelmingly racialized, and to a large degree non Christian, fabric of its graduating cohorts, UofT’s convocation ceremony continues to epitomize the institution’s Britishness, Whiteness, and Christian nature. Peppered on top of this ritual we find some “edi” and “truth and reconciliation” initiatives: the opening Land acknowledgement, the granting of honorary degrees to Indigenous, Black and racialized folks, and, more recently, the presence at the start of the procession of an eagle-feather bearer.
This year, convocation became something more.
To paraphrase Gayatri Spivak’s seminal piece, it became a space where the subalterns speak.
Indeed, despite the UofT higher administration having served notices of trespass to the campers; despite having singled out a few of occupyuoft’s leaders in their affidavit to the court; despite having waged a campaign of disinformation aimed at picturing the students’ demands for disclosure, divestment and the cutting of ties with Israeli institutions as “unreasonable”; despite picturing the encampment as an unruly and antisemitic space; despite President Gertler having, to this day, refused to meet face to face with the negotiators or visit the encampment; despite, or perhaps because of all those reasons, many students have brought Palestine into convocation hall.
There, and just like in the People’s Circle, they occupy the physical, visual, and audible space that exists between the university’s White patriciate on the one hand, and their enthusiastic peers and loved ones on the other. They are doing so by wearing Palestinian symbols, waving Palestinian flags, displaying banners, screaming “Free Palestine” to the crowd, or talking directly to the President when he is in attendance.
Most of these courageous students are racialized, and a majority are female. While we find them in all ceremonies, some fields have been more vocal in their support of the encampment — Medicine and Social Work — than in others — Management, Commerce.
Faced with such transgression of convocation’s hierarchized and ritualized displays of power, what has the university done?
So far, the UofT has not actively prevented students from wearing Palestinian symbols and showing banners. However, on Day 2, it started censoring the livestream. Since then, whenever a student comes on stage with a flag or a banner, the camera cuts to the crowd. On day 3, they also muted the cheering crowd. Thankfully, videos and pictures taken by members of the audience have allowed for this censorship to be publicly exposed and countered.
Administrators, guests and faculty seated on stage display different reactions, from enthusiastic applause ( a small minority), to, for the most part, half-assed applause and rigid half-smile to, and this is especially frequent with the higher ranking guests, an absence of smile or applause. A big donor was also pictured giving a thumbs down to one of the brave students.
By showing their support for the People’s Circle for Palestine on stage, graduates transgress the symbolic border the convocation ceremony is meant to enforce. There, in front of a cheering, supportive crowd that acts as a chorus, they not only bring the very encampment administrators have fought so hard to dismantle and discredit into the sacred precinct of the university; they also show the university’s colonial administration how naked it is.
Through their courageous stances, these students refuse the university as it is being shaped by UofT’s White, and increasingly Zionist and corporate, élite. Instead, they affirm that they, the students, are the university. In the face of a too-often disconnected, blasée and coward lineup of White administrators, they exemplify what true experiential learning and epistemic justice entail: the active resistance to colonial violence; the courage to embrace discomfort as a liberatory act of (un)learning; and the rooting of one’s learning through communities of care.
It is in these interstitial spaces of colonial encounters, be they encampments or convocation ceremonies, that the liberatory potency of epistemic justice lies. In this moment of profound moral and ethical failure, these students are teaching us what epistemic justice, should, could, and does, look like.
