Abstract
As a strategy for transterritorial freedom and dialogic world-building, the People's University for Palestine across campuses became a seedbed for exchanging knowledge, tactics, and strategies, with clear goals to "disclose, divest, defend, and declare" for a free Palestine. At San Francisco State University, the student encampment achieved divestments from four corporations — Lockheed Martin, Leonardo, Palantir, and Caterpillar — all supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza. This article highlights the feminist space, politics, and pedagogies of gathering that created the infrastructure of the People's University for Palestine—the watchtower (EZLN 2015) of analysis that students, faculty, and community members created together. The encampment was a space of encounter that flourished many seedbeds—what the Indigenous Zapatistas call escuelitas (little schools). It examines how the Zapatista principle of Mandar Obedeciendo, or "leading by obeying," threaded the fabric of the encampment as a feminist gathering. Gathering, as the Zapatistas remind the world, is a goal in itself against the patriarchal capitalist hydra that isolates, divides, and separates communities from land and each other. This gathering through encampment activated what Loubna Qutami and the Palestinian Youth Movement have theorized as a "politics of joint-struggle" (Qutami, 2018). Gathering in joint-struggle and leading by obeying Palestinians facing genocide were the roots of successful divestment.
AI Usage
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Recommended Citation
Quintanilla, Leslie
(2026)
"Confronting the Storm: Dispatches from the Night Watch at the People’s University for Palestine,"
Gatherings: Vol. 3:
Iss.
1, Article 5.
Available at:
https://fisherpub.sjf.edu/gatherings/vol3/iss1/5