Abstract
Spring 2024 witnessed student encampment protests around the US and world protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Israeli occupation in Palestine. The University of Denver (DU) became part of this movement in April when students established a Palestine solidarity encampment, permitted by DU's then-current freedom of expression policies. To protect students' free speech rights, we trained as marshals alongside faculty and staff colleagues to ensure student rights, peacefully de-escalate tensions, and keep all community members safe. This essay adopts an autoethnographic approach grounded in our lived experiences and care-based interactions with campus and broader community. Taking an intersectional approach that considers our privileges and positionalities, we show how as faculty marshals we sought to recalibrate campus narratives around the encampment and student support, protect students' rights to speak and protest while maintaining educational access, and steer administrative decisions toward equity and learning. We reflect on successes and failures of our approaches and how our commitments to multiple constituencies were guided by goals to support our students and ensure a meaningful encampment experience for our community. We each communicated with groups to which we were accountable—Andrea with admin/staff/faculty, Dheepa with students/faculty senators—while maintaining our values as feminist scholars, our commitment to holding our institution accountable for its espoused values, and our ethical responsibility to work toward ending the genocide in Gaza.
Recommended Citation
Stanton, Andrea L. and Sundaram, Dheepa
(2026)
"Feminist Solidarities and an Ethos of Care: Reflecting on Faculty Marshal Experiences at the University of Denver,"
Gatherings: Vol. 3:
Iss.
1, Article 7.
Available at:
https://fisherpub.sjf.edu/gatherings/vol3/iss1/7