Space, community, and possibility in practices of commoning in students’ protests in Argentina: the case of ‘la toma’ [the take-over]

Abstract

In this article, we describe a student protest at an Argentinian university in 2018. The student protesters took over the School of Humanities and Sciences of Education at a national university for 18 days, in defence of public education and against budget cuts. The teaching, research, and administrative life of the School was interrupted during that time. The take-over spread to several Schools in the same university, and to other national public universities in the country. Theoretically grounded on the notion of the commons within a politics of location, data comprised a questionnaire answered by 16 language undergraduates, a corpus of the take-over collected by them between 2nd and 25th September 2018 (written statements, posters, leaflets, advertisements, photos, murals, videos, etc.), and their reflections on their corpus. Content analysis disclosed the experiences of the commons and the practices of commoning in the setting – under-researched in the Global South. It also revealed that the commons became a way of enacting political activism in a locally specific way. While the space of the take-over was embraced as a defence of human rights, social justice and inclusion, it was simultaneously used to enact practices of exclusion and threat.