Today, the relation between university and society is again topic of debate due to increased attention to the ‘third mission’ of universities (Arbo and Benneworth 2007; Laredo 2007; Schuetze 2012; Zomer and Benneworth 2011). In their recent vision statement for 2030, for instance, the European Universities Association envisions ‘universities without walls…that are open and engaged in society while retaining their core values’ (EUA 2021: 5). Although some definitions narrow down the third mission to relations with industry and private businesses, a broader definition that understands third mission as the various and multiple relations between university and society forms the point of departure of the problematisation undertaken in this article. In any case, there is little consensus about the precise meaning of the third mission, except for it being some kind of engagement with society and it being something different from teaching and research (the first two missions) (Graf et al. 2021).
In a systematic literature review, Lorenzo Compagnucci and Francesca Spigarelli state that the definition of the third mission is rather ‘nebulous and ambiguous’ (2020: 1). Moreover, different policy contexts and research traditions use different terms to refer to the phenomenon (Pinheiro et al. 2017), such as ‘third stream’ (Laredo 2007: 442), ‘knowledge transfer’ (Hacket and Dilts 2004: 71), ‘university-business cooperation’ (Adamsone-Fiskovica et al. 2009: 135), ‘community engagement’ (Jongbloed et al. 2008: 312–13), or ‘public engagement, service missions, and community service’ (Vargiu 2014: 564). Whereas some definitions stress industrial-economic motives underlying the third mission, others put more emphasis on social and political incentives.
Compagnucci and Spigarelli attempt to discern three features of the literature that seem to stand out. First, the third mission seems to have gained in importance in the wake of what Henry Etzkowitz has called the ‘entrepreneurial university’ (1983: 198). This university seeks to create surplus value by patenting research findings, issuing licences, and engaging in research joint ventures and spin off-companies. Second, the third mission concerns activities that aim to transfer knowledge to organisations (both for-profit and non-profit) and society at large, while promoting social welfare via the development of human capital (e.g., degrees, certificates). Third, the third mission fosters the development of both science and society through various forms of communication and social engagement enabled by and within the university. Based on these features, Compagnucci and Spigarelli come up with the following definition: ‘the TM [third mission] is the relationship between universities and stakeholders from the non-academic world. A TM is the sum of all activities concerned with the generation, use, application and exploitation of university knowledge, capabilities and resources, outside of the academic environment’ (2020: 5).
This definition is still quite ambiguous and heavily dependent on the kind of activities being carried out under the banner of third mission, the degree of territorial embeddedness of universities, the historically developed and context-dependent institutional frameworks of universities, and the kind of community involved in third mission-activities (e.g., industry, business, civil society). What seems to stand out most is that the third mission reacts against the idea of the university as an ivory tower, that it aims to transfer knowledge to society, and that this relation to society is predominantly understood in a narrow sense of socio-economic development. In that sense, the third mission discourse is part of a larger philosophical debate about the social role of the university (Simons and Masschelein 2009), the meaning of co-produced and collaborative research (Facer 2020), and the university's embeddedness in various ecosystems (Barnett 2017). To distinguish the general, philosophical meaning of third mission as the social role of the university from the specific interpretation it received within policy discourses in recent years, I will capitalise third mission when referring to the latter, narrow definition that came in the wake of the entrepreneurial university.
In this article, I want to point out some of the internal inconsistencies of the Third Mission discourse as it is formulated today as well as reclaim the third mission from its narrow involvement within the construction of an entrepreneurial university so that it might become interesting from a broader social and educational perspective. In doing so, I suggest reinterpreting the third mission through the conceptual lens of the common while shifting the focus to the practices of the university, rather than its institutional form. In line with recent scholarship on the common and commons, I understand the common here as a productive and reproductive relationality that emerges around a set of shared resources that can be either material (e.g., land, water, infrastructure; see Ostrom 1990) or immaterial (e.g., knowledge, information, language; see Hess and Ostrom 2007). The common, moreover, is not something static but renews itself in careful practices of commoning, that is, sharing and making use of the common resource (De Angelis 2017; Means et al. 2017). The common, lastly, exists as part of a wider conceptual set, including other notions such as the commons, the common good, commoning, and commoners (Bollier 2014; Szadkowski 2019), and promises us an alternative to the public–private distinction that structures the liberal-democratic social imaginary (Federici 2018). In the development of my argument, I will draw on the actual practice of the Palestinian experimental university Campus in Camps, for which the common is of particular importance. Before reclaiming the third mission drawing on the common, the next part analyses how the Third Mission discourse has affected conceptualisations of the relation between university and society.
The university between public and private: The Third Mission paradox
The starting point of the analysis is the observation that in spite of the spreading of a Third Mission rhetoric in discourses of researchers, policy makers and university administrators, the social engagement of the university itself, or the idea that the university could contribute to the public good of society, seems to have shrunk. This is a paradoxical observation as one would assume that more attention for the social dimension of the university would go hand in hand with policies that aim to foster links between university and society in order to create and disseminate knowledge for the public good. However, the very nature of the Third Mission discourse itself seems to have hollowed out the idea that universities contribute something to society, or at least, there seems to be a quite narrow conception of these contributions at play. Several reasons can be given as to why the attention to Third Mission has hollowed out the social role of the university. The focus here will be on a conceptual analysis of the shifted meanings of the three missions of the university. Important to bear in mind here is the discrepancy between the third mission of the university as a philosophical concept that indicates the social role of the university broadly understood and Third Mission as a policy buzzword that has gained currency in recent years.
A first crucial step in this analysis has to do with how the first two missions – research and teaching – have been redefined since the insertion of the university into the global knowledge economy ‘in which the role of a state is to maximise the country's competitiveness by optimising the capacity of its institutional and human resources to generate “knowledge” that can be turned into “innovations” and spawn new knowledge industries’ (Wright 2016: 62). Research as well as teaching seem to have been reinterpreted against the background of an increased concern for the social relevance of the university. In that sense, the Third Mission comes forward not so much as an additional mission in its own right but more as a mission that envelops the first two missions. In other words, this means that both research and teaching have to be socially relevant or at least have to be made socially relevant. Important to note is that the social relevance of research and teaching is narrowly defined in line with the needs of the global knowledge economy.
For research, this development implies in concreto that research activities should have an immediate bearing on social and economic life, thus foregrounding applied research, often in collaboration with private businesses, to the detriment of fundamental or curiosity-driven research. Usefulness and applicability hence become important criteria for the evaluation of research and the awarding of grants (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). For teaching, this enveloping implies that the knowledge, skills and competencies afforded in higher education programmes should be aligned with the knowledge, skills and competencies required by the labour market. Given the condition of the knowledge economy and the need for flexible, cognitive labour, this means in the first place to train students to become employable in various knowledge-intensive sectors (Simons and Masschelein 2009). What happens in the background of this social-economic revaluation of the first two missions is the devaluation of the third mission of the university, the fostering of its social relevance broadly understood as worthwhile in and of itself.
However, the social role of the university as a third mission sui generis is not only being played down in favour of overemphasising the social relevance of research and teaching as the first two missions. The social relevance itself of these first two missions is being perceived almost solely through a narrow economic or commercial lens, namely as an additional means for the university to sell products and services that could be of use for society (e.g., patents, licences, commodities, degrees, certificates) and that provide additional income for the university. Compagnucci and Spigarelli discuss how increasing policy attention on the third mission has coincided with the reconfiguration of the modern research university as an entrepreneurial university (Etzkowitz 1983) and the demand to rely less on public investment and to adopt a more mercantile attitude towards research and teaching as marketable goods (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). The focus of university management shifts here to ‘knowledge transfer’, boundary spanning organisations and intermediary networks that enable surplus value to be created and cashed in. Therefore, Cris Shore and Laura McLauchlan define the Third Mission in a rather critical way as ‘activities geared towards “knowledge transfer”, forging links with industry and commercialising university research and teaching’ (2012: 267).
Based on the developments mentioned above and given political tendencies to decrease public investment in universities, the Third Mission comes forward as a necessary evil to make the entrepreneurial university viable in the first place. These disinvestments and entrepreneurial reforms are obviously heavily dependent on national policy contexts, sociocultural value frameworks, and institutional management (Shore and Wright 2017; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). Nevertheless, on a conceptual level and from a critical point of view, the Third Mission appears as ‘a new way of bringing in much-needed resources, such as funds, collaborations and access to facilities, from different sources’ that were until then provided by public resources (Compagnucci and Spigarelli 2020: 7). This development points to a Third Mission paradox because a self-proclaimed focus on social concerns in higher education policy obfuscates processes of public disinvestment and the withdrawal of the university from social life broadly understood in favour of more lucrative and opportune focused engagements with partners from the private sector.
This paradox signifies the emergence of a university that tries to maintain itself via private partnerships in an environment that is increasingly populated with corporate businesses and for-profit organisations (Shore and Wright 2017). The university becomes an oikos, a home or environment, for a new kind of academic ethos to develop itself, namely that of the ‘entrepreneurial researcher’ who is always on the lookout for profitable partnerships (Shore and McLauchlan 2012: 271) and the ‘independent learner’ who moves through an environment of learning opportunities while accumulating credit until the degree is granted (Simons 2020: 1). Against the background of the turning of the third mission of the university into a commercial Third Mission that focuses on knowledge transfer, the next part endeavours to formulate this issue in a slightly different way. It questions the expression ‘relation between university and society’, on which the idea of knowledge transfer (from university to society) seems to be built and re-reads the problematic through the lens of the common.
Reconsidering the third mission through the lens of the common
Framing the third mission in terms of an attempt to strengthen the relation between university and society is a sign of the alienation of the university in a twofold way: first, the university seems to have become disconnected from social issues and affairs in spite of (or maybe indeed due to) Third Mission policies; and, secondly, this framing also ignores the many interrelations and exchanges that already exist and continue to proliferate between the university and other institutions, organisations and corporations – its embeddedness in a landscape that is populated by other non-profit and for-profit organisations (Wright 2016). The problem with this ‘university and society’ framing, more in particular, is that it starts from an institutional take on the university, as if the university is a self-enclosed entity that confronts an outside world from which it is originally disconnected.
From a political-philosophical point of view, the institutional perspective conceives of the university in terms of the dialectics between constituted and constituent power. Whereas constituted power refers to the crystallised form of the university as institution, constituent power refers to the underlying social forces absorbed by the university once it has been brought into being as an institution. In this view the institution comes forward as a form of constituted power that has consumed and reified the constituent power of the collective desire – the driving forces and energies that go beyond the status quo and overflow the boundaries of constituted power – gathered by a particular idea of the university (Szadkwoski and Krzeski 2021). To break this dialectic between idea and institution, constituent and constituted power, and to bring in a slightly different perspective on the university, I will shift focus here to the practices that take place within the institutional shell of the university – the actions performed by those who make up the many collectives inhabiting the university as institution. More particularly, the article focuses on practices of study as an ‘instituent praxis’ that reclaims the university (Szadkowski and Krzeski 2021: 1) ‘inside and in spite of’ the institution of the university (Savransky 2019: 142). While focusing on practices, the relation between university and society does not come forward in terms of two separate vessels that need to be connected but rather as locally, temporarily, and partially enacted within a multitude of practices of study that engage with issues of common concern and that gather a collective of studiers around these issues.1
This shift from institution to practices hangs together with another theoretical shift pursued in this article, namely from a point of view based on the public–private dichotomy to one that is based on the concept of the common. The policy developments sketched earlier and the third mission in particular could be seen as symptomatic of the blurring of the boundaries between public and private in higher education (Guzmán-Valenzuela 2016; Marginson 2018) and the claim that the dichotomy is in fact a false one (Neary and Winn 2017). The point has been made already that the discourse about the Third Mission as contributing to the public good indeed goes hand in hand with extensive public disinvestment in higher education. Moreover, making the university more public ‘again’, as if an easy return to the past would be an option, does seem not only impossible but also undesirable as many neoliberal reforms that caused this blurring have been pushed through by the state (Marginson 2016). The third sphere of the common seems at this point to be a valuable alternative to the invalidated dichotomy of the public and the private.
In general terms, the common denotes a kind of resource that is owned, regulated and taken care of collectively. It has a particular dynamic and processual character in that its nature changes in the course of it being used by the collective of so-called commoners. This process is often called commoning, and it foregrounds the fact that the common maintains itself through renewal that transforms not only the common itself but also those involved in its maintenance (Bollier 2014; De Angelis 2017). The common is always already there in shared activities but is at the same time continuously under threat of being enclosed. The common is at once an inexhaustible source of value-creation and something that has to be expropriated to monetise the socially created value. In that sense, ‘the common is a condition that enables the functioning of academic capitalism [by privatising what is created collectively] as well as a foundation on which one can plan and build an alternative to it’ (Szadkowski 2019: 243).
The common makes it possible to look at practices taking place at the university from a slightly different angle. From the perspective of the common, knowledge creation, for example, always starts from a shared knowledge base and elaborates or transforms this knowledge during collaboration with not only other researchers but possibly also texts, machines, animals, viruses, rivers, stones, and other beings that are implicated in the kind of knowledge being created. Under the regime of academic capitalism, then, this new knowledge is also what has to be commodified and sold on the market (as a patent, a licence, a degree, etc.). Therefore, the common is at once what creates value and what is continuously being expropriated. The common is at once what is always already there and what always has to be reclaimed in order to face the continuous threat of enclosure. In that sense, its processual character makes it into something precarious, something that has to be taken care for collectively.
The example makes clear that the literature on the common is of particular importance to the university and higher education. In a literature review, Szadkowski (2019) disentangles the notions that accompany the concept of the common in higher education literature, differentiating it from similar concepts, such as the commons and the common good, and fleshing out its internal architecture in terms of what the common means in relation to the ontology, politics, ownership, governance, benefits and finance of higher education. Remarkably, the educational relevance of the common does not seem to be addressed explicitly and its conceptual articulation is underdeveloped. Turning to the actual practice of the Palestinian experimental university Campus in Camps and their engagement with the common, the following section aims to articulate the educational bearing of the common in more detail.
Reclaiming the common: The story of Campus in Camps
At this point, the concern of the article shifts from a critical take on the capitalisation of the third mission of the university to a more post-critical stance that aims to propose, in an affirmative mode, a specific way of thinking about the problematic and how the common can help us in reformulating this problem. It is a way of doing theory development based on a story and takes seriously Donna Haraway's thesis that ‘it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with’ (2016: 12). In that sense, this post-critical mode of theory development is future-oriented in that it aims at the activation of possibles where deadlocks seemed to prevail and it dramatises the highly contingent nature of the present by paying attention to the emergence of outliers that facilitate taking a distance from the present and provide footholds for speculation about different possible futures (Schildermans 2020). The story that will take centre stage here is that of the third-generation Palestinian refugees who founded the grassroots university Campus in Camps.2
The story brings us to Dheisheh, a refugee camp in the West Bank that had come into being in 1948, shortly after the Nakba during which Palestinian families were expelled from their homes. Some ten years ago, third-generation refugees, the grandchildren of those who had to take refuge in Dheisheh, started to question the narratives of resistance that had remained unchanged in the camp, in spite of the developments in its built infrastructure and social support network. The right of return, the dominant narrative of resistance that claims the possibility to return to the home from before the Nakba, did not make sense any more to those third-generation refugees who were born and raised in the refugee camp and had even grown attached to the place where they had grown up. Nevertheless, this feeling of attachment did not do away with the need they felt to question the existence of the camp and to start to envisage new forms of resistance. Interestingly, the third-generation refugees did not organise themselves as a political action group, a community work organisation, or a centre for cultural activities. Instead, they organised themselves as a university, which they understood, in their own words, as ‘a place for assembly’ (Petti 2015: 76).3 It is remarkable that Campus in Camps – which is the name of their collective – claims the name university, despite the apparent dissimilarities with contemporary understandings of the university.4
What is of vital importance for the emergence of this grassroots university is the idea of the common, not only in terms of the principle of study but also as a point of orientation in problematising the situation the studiers found themselves in. The common became a way of naming the inherent sociality of the space of the camp, the relationships between the inhabitants of the camp and their ways of inhabiting this space together. Whereas in Western liberal-democratic political-philosophical discourses the public is associated with ideas of collective interest or the general will, the studiers from Dheisheh associate it rather with repressive political regimes that use the term to justify colonial dispossession and exploitation, at the expense of the common, even to the extent that they claim that ‘the public has often been used to expropriate the common’ (Hilal and Petti 2013: 133).
It comes therefore as no surprise that the suggestion by an international humanitarian organisation to construct a public square in one of the camps where the studiers were active was met with hesitation and that the perplexity induced by this proposition led to a series of problems to be developed by the studiers. In a refugee camp every construction site is a political act as it risks normalising the camp condition and undermining the right of return. Especially building a public square – the epitome of the liberal-democratic idea of the polis – was perceived as a crucial step in the unwished-for urbanisation of the camp that poses a threat to the representation of the camp as a site of struggle. During a meeting in the Women Center,5 the people gathered uttered their doubts and hesitations about the building of the square:
What activities would be acceptable in such a place, who would take care of the space, which community members should be using it, what should be the role of women in this space, and finally what should the space look like and what would be its impact on the surrounding context (Hamouz and Al-Turshan 2013: 17).
These initial discussions led to a process of study about the meaning of the camp and its relation to the city, claiming that refugee camps are sites where the categories of the public and the private enter a zone of indistinction: even the houses are built on land that is not privately owned but borrowed, and public space is limited to the small, labyrinthine alleys between blocks (Petti 2018).
Put differently, the construction of the square started a collective thinking process that allowed the studiers to question the distinction between public and private as well as the philosophical idea of the polis as an imaginary to aspire to. According to the inhabitants ‘the camp represents a sort of anti-city but also a potential counter-laboratory in which a new form of urbanism is emerging beyond the idea of the nation-state’ (Hilal and Petti 2013: 136), and, important to add, beyond the idea of the public. In that sense, the public square from which they felt slightly alienated and that seemed out-of-place had to be approached in a particular way, with careful experimentation about its possible uses so it would not thwart the refugees’ exceptional status on which political resistance is built.
While reclaiming the square, the studiers of Campus in Camps experimented with different ways of using the square to turn it into a habitat for the different people living in the camp. The studiers drew inspiration from the protest movements during the Arab revolts a few years earlier, and more in particular the reclaiming of Tahrir Square. The day after President Mubarak was forced to step down, protesters began cleaning the square as a way of doing away with the oppressive regime, while taking care of a shared space that could become something common. In that sense, cleaning the square was a way of clearing the square of its publicness and turning it into a common space where people could gather again. ‘Cleaning the square was a gesture of reappropriation, ownership, and care’ (Hilal and Petti 2013: 134). Therefore, reclaiming here does not so much mean to restore to a previous state but to render inhabitable for the future, to open up new possibilities of common use.
It is these kinds of possibilities for common use of the square (a space people initially experienced as alienating and a detriment to the claim for return) that the studiers started to experiment with immediately after cleaning the square. Organising cooking workshops and English classes provided an occasion for people to gather in the square. At the same time, it fostered discussions about the meaning of the square and its relation to the people. Some of the studiers remarked that the status of the square had shifted from public in the sense of commissioned by an external, political authority to common, meaning that it was now taken in hand by a community which generated different ways of using and relating to the square. A crucial difference here, as noticed by one of the studiers, is that ‘commons, in order to continue to be commons need to be preserved, taken care of, maintained, protected. But they also need to be activated by people – in a sense, they need to “function”’ (Segatto 2013: 64). It is this particularity of the camp as a common space or as a space that can be activated during practices of commoning that resurfaced in other activities of Campus in Camps as well.6
Ilana Feldman, an anthropologist who was involved in some of the activities of Campus in Camps, claims that their practice of study allowed for an ‘affective reconfiguration’ to take place that altered the way in which the inhabitants thought and felt about the camp (Feldman 2016: 424). The experiments in the square made them slow down in front of the life in common in the camp, and it was a lived alternative to the imaginary of the public. One of the studiers remarks that ‘as a third-generation refugee, considering the strong relationship that combines me with my friends from the different villages in the refugee camps, the notion of return takes different patterns and dimensions than being limited to single private property’ (Al-Barbary 2013: 17). In other words, in the course of studying the camp, the particular sociality of the camp started to come to matter in new and unforeseen ways to the studiers. Whereas before the right of return signified primarily a return to the private house from the past (a legal-political right granted by the public authority of a nation-state), it now started to acquire an altogether new meaning as a ‘return to the common’ which emphasised the sociality of the camp (Al-Barbary 2013: 14).
In that sense, and to that extent, this event signified an escape from the future that is dialectically tied to the settler colonial imaginary of exploitation under the banner of public progress. Feldman (2016) argues that the first loss of the people being colonised is the possibility to imagine the future from this subordinate point of view because their imagination of the future is always already marked by the desire to negate the coloniser's vision of the future. In that sense, problematising the public-private distinction necessitated a rethinking of the right of return itself and, more in particular, whether it still made sense to claim a return to the private home of the past. During one of the discussions, one of the studiers uttered: ‘No, my message is, the right of return is not to return to the single-family house, the single property in Beit Jibrin, but to return back to the common – to return to the sea and the city’ (Isshaq Al-Barbary as quoted in Hilal and Petti 2013: 145). In that sense, studying the camp allowed the studiers to change the perspective on political resistance and to reframe the right of return in terms of a return to the common.
Studying from, in, and for the common
It goes without saying that a situated story cannot provide a conclusive answer to how the common in the university can be conceived of from an educational angle. Instead, it operates as a lure for thinking and feeling in that it creates a slightly different awareness of the situation the university is in, opening new ways of conceiving of the third mission. Within Campus in Camps, the common is something that comes to matter to the studiers of this grassroots university in the process of studying itself. The common emerges as something the existence of which cannot be neglected or downplayed any more in favour of narratives of improvement of individual lives by people returning to their private homes or of narratives that tell about the necessity of investments in public infrastructure to ameliorate living conditions. In the course of very concrete practices, such as the cleaning of the square and experimenting with different possibilities of using this space, studiers became sensitive to the common that they help to intensify in a way that opens up futures that are different from the ones that are presented as obvious or necessary while taking care of how these futures might be enacted and which consequences they would entail.
The following paragraphs disentangle several aspects of the notion of the common as it comes forward in the practice of Campus in Camps, with specific attention to its educational dimension. First, the notion of the common as an immanent and self-constituting sociality seems to refer here to the ways of working and studying together during which the square was taken in hand again by a collective of studiers and transformed into or reclaimed as a commons. In that sense, the common comes forward as a transformative force that gathers people and materials and engages them in a process that pragmatically enacts new relations (between people, things, places) and ways of thinking and feeling about a situation of concern. The common is therefore both cause and effect of the educational process; the common fuels and incites the practice through which it is renewed. In that sense, the common comes forward as the social site of study where the boundary between university and society cannot be drawn, but where a university, as a place of assembly, comes into being around a cause of common concern (in this case, the construction of a public square in a refugee camp).
As a site of study, the common provides an oikos for a different kind of ethos to risk itself. Instead of the entrepreneurial researcher who speculates on which research might lead to the biggest financial returns (Shore and McLauchlan 2012) or the independent learner who moves through ‘self-directed learning trajectories’ based on personal talents, interests and passions (Simons 2020: 5), the ethos that emerges here is that of the studier who hesitates in the presence of a question that via the development of a study practice has acquired the power to slow down thinking. For instance, while discussing about the future of the square, several studiers started to object to the categories that tended to structure their thinking about space (in this case, most saliently the public-private distinction), opening up new perspectives on the square and new ways of relating to it. Moreover, while studying, the right of return was stripped of its mobilising force as a cause for political action and instead became something the studiers started to hesitate in front of.
In that way, the common seems to have come forward as a point of orientation for political struggle that was not given beforehand but that emerged in the course of practices of study. Or to put it more precisely: during practices of study, the common started to come to matter to the studiers involved in a new way. In that sense, the common did not constitute in itself the end of the educational process but appeared via study as a point of orientation for politics. Therefore, studying the camp was in and of itself not a political activity geared at specific and predefined ends but rather constituted ‘an occasion for politics’ (Ford 2017: 457) that allowed for redefining the right of return as a return to the common.
From knowledge transfer to a frontline pedagogy
To conclude, and returning to our initial problematic, namely to re-articulate the third mission of the university from the bottom up, these last paragraphs will try to do so starting from the story of Campus in Camps, while embedding the third mission immediately within the practices of the university, understood as practices of study that create, sustain and reclaim the common. From the perspective afforded by these shifts, the third mission does not come forward as something that is done in addition to research and teaching as way to commercialise research and teaching or as a means to transfer knowledge to the wider public. Rather, the third mission constitutes here a pedagogy of the frontline where basic research and social engagement become thoroughly enmeshed (Masschelein 2019).
Re-reading the third mission in terms of a frontline pedagogy has strong repercussions for our understanding of the knowledge being created in the course of activities that gather academic and non-academic actors, such as living labs, service-learning courses, project work and other forms of ‘outreach’ pedagogy. Practices of study, such as Campus in Camps, provide a vital alternative to the ‘trickle down-epistemology’ (Latour 2016: 9) that undergirds conceptions of the third mission as knowledge transfer from the university to the wider society. During practices of study, knowledge is not created first in the university and then passed on to society – a conception of knowledge transfer that reifies the imagined boundaries between university and society. Rather, the knowledge being created is of the order of an event in that it signifies the coming into being of a different sense of awareness of the situation the actors involved – academic and non-academic – find themselves in, making them hesitate in front of questions that do not have easy solutions.
From this perspective, the meaning and use of the knowledge that is being generated is not settled beforehand or speculated on. Rather, knowledge acquires its value during processes in which it comes into being for those who are involved in these practices. The relevance of knowledge creation is then not derived from its financial revenue or contribution to personal growth but is like an ‘adventure’ (Savransky 2016) in which things that went unnoticed can come to matter, open a space for hesitation by interrupting established ways of thinking, and make other futures possible. This ‘new’ knowledge cannot be commodified and exchanged on the market but is an inflection in the becoming of the common, a common that does not belong to the past, exploited by primitive accumulation, or to a future accessed after the contradictions inherent in capitalism have been resolved but is a common that is always already there, awaiting to be reclaimed.
Notes
Following Tyson Lewis, I use the word ‘studiers’ instead of ‘students’ to refer to the people engaged in practices of study. Whereas the notion of students evokes a sociological meaning of those enrolled in study programmes at a university, the concept of studiers diverges from such an institutional take and shifts the emphasis to the practical engagements and ways of saying and doing of these people (see Lewis 2013, 2014).
Campus in Camps is certainly not the only initiative that reclaims the name of the university. The movement of the free universities, for instance, criticises in its own way existing university management and governance while creating spaces of study in the margins or outside of the university (Amsler 2017; Connell 2019; Thompsett 2017). At first glance, Campus in Camps’ modus operandi might look similar to that of the free universities, but what is interesting is that the initiative is not founded primarily on the discontent with existing universities but rather out of a need for a place to study and think about life in the camp and political resistance. In that sense, it does not instrumentalise the university again for a predefined political project (as the free university risks to do in its engagement against the existing university) but rather to reclaim it as a space where something acquires the power to make studiers think differently about the future and where a hesitation in front of predefined political projects gets a chance.
The initiators drew inspiration from the informal and illicit learning networks that came into being during the First Intifada in 1987 when the Israeli government prohibited people to gather and closed all schools and universities (Petti 2015).
Campus in Camps, for instance, does not offer degrees; there are no admission criteria for prospective students, nor does it have an extensive research programme of which the results are published in academic journals. Moreover, it does not strive for ‘excellence’ or seek to attract the interests of the industry or other big funding bodies. On its website, no information can be found about the different faculties, research centres, or curricula, simply because it does not have any. The analysis presented here is based on documents developed by the studiers that can be found on their website (http://www.campusincamps.ps), in texts written by initiators Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, and in conversations with the initiators and participants, and secondary literature (see Elzenbaumer 2018; Feldman 2016; Franceschini 2018; Franceschini and Guerrini 2017).
The Women Center was initiated by Ayat Al-Turshan who participated in earlier activities of Campus in Camps. She grappled with the issue of creating a place for women to gather and engage in discussion in Fawwar. In this camp such places were mostly run by men, and women often felt excluded.
These other activities included mapping exercises, photography, ethnographic observation, interviews and focus groups with other inhabitants. For a more elaborate analysis of the activities of Campus in Camps, see Schildermans et al. (2019) and Schildermans (2021). In the framework of this article, the focus lies on the experiments in reclaiming the square because the idea of the common is developed most extensively in relation to this activity.
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