Abstract
This paper utilizes autoethnographic modes to reflect on the student movement in solidarity with Palestine, specifically the spring 2024 student encampment in Washington, DC. I frame this reflection through my experience as a student in a Women and Gender Studies class during the semester of the encampment, as well as through feminist theories of teaching and learning as liberatory practices. I analyze two sites of learning that moved beyond the ideological and physical boundaries of the university into public protest spaces during times of political mobilization: downtown Beirut during the October 2019 Lebanese thawra (revolution) and the student encampments for Palestine in the United States. I look at how classroom environments in both Washington, DC, and in Beirut, Lebanon were transformed by protest movements in DC and Beirut. In both protest contexts, learning spaces shifted due to political crises, which created space for alternative pedagogies that, in turn, shaped the classroom. This essay argues that in the 2024 DC encampment, practices of love, care, and learning moved in tandem from the classroom to the student encampment. In DC, students, professors, and community members formed and embodied alternative political visions through the physical space of the encampment: a collaborative, non-hierarchical space of care and love for Palestine. These affects of love and care, as well as the affective power of occupying physical space and embodied learning, form a transformative force that may empower political action.
Recommended Citation
Wessels, Anna
(2026)
"Spaces of Transformation, Love, and Poetry: Autoethnographic Reflections on Learning during the 2024 Student Solidarity Encampments and the 2019 Lebanese Thawra,"
Gatherings: Vol. 3:
Iss.
2, Article 9.
Available at:
https://fisherpub.sjf.edu/gatherings/vol3/iss2/9