‘Decolonisation Isn’t Just a Buzzword’: An Interview with the University of Birmingham Liberated Zone
Situated in Edgbaston, a wealthy suburb of Britain’s second city, the redbrick University of Birmingham hardly has a reputation for radicalism. Its students’ union is known as the Guild, and the campus exhibits the civic imprint of industrialist and social-imperialist Joseph Chamberlain. However, it has not been immune to the national wave of student protest that began this spring in opposition to the genocide in Gaza and complicity of the British government and institutions. For three months, during the summer exam period, dozens of colourful tents and flags decorated the Green Heart lawn on central campus.
The encampment was dismantled in a dawn raid after university management procured a High Court possession order on 10 July. But the Palestine solidarity movement on the campus is not over. Ebb met up with one of the camp organisers, PhD student Alma, by the now-empty Green Heart, to discuss the experience of the encampment so far. The interview explores how the camp has sought to develop participatory democracy, material solidarities, and alternative pedagogy – against the grain of the neoliberal education system and its legal repression. Alma also foregrounds connections with a more radical campus heritage, including the legacy of Stuart Hall, and students’ desire to take their anti-colonial and anti-racist activism into the wider city.
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Alfie: To begin, can you tell us how the camp at the University of Birmingham got started?
Alma: Before the camp started on May 9th, we did quite a lot of demos on campus. We had a few stationary rallies around here or around Old Joe [the clocktower named after Chamberlain], and a few marches, and it was clear the university administration weren’t listening to what we were saying. They were well attended, we had a lot of staff and students, but it just wasn’t doing anything to make university management sit and listen to us. And concurrently, there were a lot of issues with the way management were responding to the ongoing crisis. There was going to be a ‘Talk and Listen’ event about the history of Palestine, which was cancelled by Law School management because it used a watermelon emoji on the poster. There were a couple other events that were cancelled, and incidents of students saying things in support of Palestine and being shut down by course administrators or teachers. And we thought that, you know, what we were doing just wasn’t enough.
We saw how amazing what happened in America was, with the first camp at Columbia on April 17th and the following demonstrations of student power and solidarity across the country. That was incredible to see. It opened up our eyes to a whole new way of protesting on campus, of hopefully having our voices heard by the people who had been ignoring us until then. We weren’t the first encampment in the UK, we saw what happened with Warwick, and we thought there was no reason we couldn’t replicate that. And that if we did it on the Green Heart, they would have to listen.
Alfie: What motivated you, individually, to get involved?
Alma: I have friends who are at the camp in Columbia, but I also just thought, and this is something a lot of my friends spoke about at the same time: What would I do in 10 years if something like this had happened and I weren’t involved, and people asked, oh, what did you do? What were you doing? And if I was like, oh, well, I sat in my office and I didn’t want to go outside because I was afraid. And we were like, that would just be pathetic, and useless; it would be the opposite of displaying our solidarity. We thought, well, we have to do it because what else can we do?
Alfie: What has the response from students and staff been like?
Alma: From students and staff, it was genuinely amazing. The first day the camp was there, people obviously weren’t used to it yet. People would walk past us and be like, oh, what’s going on? They would come and visit us and ask what we were doing. So eventually we set up a whole team to deal with outreach, so there would always be someone who could explain what we were doing. But from the very beginning, people would just stop by, they’d be curious. Loads of people bought us donations, we had enough pot noodles to have done that camp for like a year minimum.
A lot of staff were similarly receptive. We set up a Student-Staff Coalition to make camp decisions and govern what we were doing. The UCU and Unison reps were really helpful in terms of giving us a bit more legitimacy because university management don’t really listen to students, they're more likely to listen to the unions. Both unions made statements in support of us and stood up for us against whatever the Vice Chancellor [Adam Tickell] was putting out in his weekly emails. And, in general, so many staff stopped by, brought us donations, spent time with us. A lot of staff donated their time in doing teach-outs on their areas of expertise. The display of solidarity was amazing. There was one teach-out by a law professor who did the history of protest on campus. Someone did protest law 101, which was useful. I’m a member of staff, so I did one on my PhD topic. We also had a lot of external speakers. We had Moazzam Begg [Birmingham-born author and survivor of Guantanamo Bay] come and do a talk which was amazing, and people from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. People in the community who felt they had something to share came and donated their time to us.
Alfie: You mentioned learning about previous campus protests. Within the camp, has there been a sense of becoming a part of that history?
Alma: At the moment there’s all this memorialisation around Stuart Hall and the Cultural Studies Institute going on. There were two conferences about that while the camp was up, and the organisers asked us to come and speak about how what we were doing linked to the history of activism on campus, but also in Birmingham more generally. We didn’t go in person because we would’ve had to give our full legal names, but we wrote a statement that those academics read aloud, which opened up a discussion panel, which was really cool. It helped, I think, insert the camp into the [university] narrative that has already been there, that university management were actively trying to shut down. We did a lot of teach-outs ourselves. We had a radical lending library based on these ideas of solidarity, of remembering the struggles that have happened before us and how we fit into those, especially about anti-colonialism and anti-racism in the UK and beyond.
Alfie: What did solidarity mean for the camp, and how was solidarity informed by these ideas?
Alma: It was very important to us. I think that everything we did was in solidarity with people in Palestine and Palestinians in the diaspora. We tried to make sure everything we were doing was in keeping with the history of the last 76 years of occupation, rather than just like, hey, we’re hanging out on some grass for a bit. We never wanted it to seem like we were making decisions that were best for us as a camp but, you know, decisions in solidarity with what we were seeing in Palestine, but also across the globe in the wider solidarity movement.
In terms of campus organising, I think solidarity meant no one person was in charge of anything. These were all decisions we took together. It did mean that sometimes meetings lasted for like three hours, but, you know, that’s how it goes sometimes. There’s a national encampment movement, so we were in connection with all the other camps across the UK the whole time. But with the global movement, we were obviously learning from what was happening in America. That was where this all started. And we had people visiting our camp who were from Palestine or from other places where there had been camps, and we could all learn from each other. One of our campers was also Palestinian.
We had loads of people who just stayed for one or two nights when they could, or would come and spend time with us in the day, or come to actions we had planned. It was really about meeting people where they’re at, which is also a really big part of solidarity. Not everyone can do everything all the time, but everyone can do something.
Alfie: Could you say a bit more about the role of pedagogy in the camp?
Alma: We’re on campus, and the camp was a sort of alternative learning space – or teaching space – away from the hierarchy of the classroom, but also outside of the curriculum that we are allowed to teach and learn inside the university buildings. Because the thing about Palestine is lots of people really want to help, but don’t know how. So a big part of the camp was making sure people understood what they were doing, what we were doing, and why it was important.
You can teach about anti-colonialism inside redbrick buildings like this as much as you want, but if your students don’t take that away and actually apply it to their lives, and the country around them, what is the point? I try to do my teaching the way that I did it on the camp rather than the way the university would want you to, but one thing that struck me is – when we’re teaching on camp, or just talking on camp – it’s easier to contextualise what we’ve learned. I did my undergrad here and we were taught about Edward Said, and about colonialism and resistance. No one ever said that he was Palestinian. And then you do resistance on campus, and they’re like, no, not like that. It’s abstract. And I think the way it was taught or learned in the camp was direct. It was happening, it was what we were doing.
Alfie: Were there other constraints the neoliberal university imposed upon student involvement?
Alma: Obviously, there’s always the concern, you know, because people have paid – I have like 40 grand in student loans, people want to graduate because otherwise you’re fucked. We had quite a lot of people doing their exams in our tents, studying in tents. But a lot of people dedicated the time they could, and that’s still valuable. People were concerned [about security] but there are ways you can mitigate risks, like we were masked, used code names, we stayed relatively anonymous. We always had people who were on watch. We assessed every action we did to see what the risks would be. People knew what they were signing up for.
Alfie: Staying on the theme of active solidarity, was the camp able to take its activism into the wider city?
Alma: We had those links the whole time we were setting up – external non-campus groups came to support us constantly. And now the camp doesn’t exist as a physical space, we’re looking at ways we can diffuse out into Birmingham. Obviously, when the next academic year starts, we will be back and campus will be a central focus. But campus is a very small part of a very large city with a big, diverse pro-Palestinian movement already. We’re trying to see how we can fit into that, offer support to other groups, how other groups can support us.
And then as well, in terms of what’s happened recently in Birmingham and in other cities across the country [with the response to the racist riots], it was really important that we could show solidarity with that organising. A large portion of the camp that’s still in Birmingham were at those two demos, in the Jewellery Quarter and the town centre. Because none of this happens in a vacuum. There are people organising in Birmingham who are saying, oh no, this isn’t part of the Palestine solidarity movement, it’s not relevant to us. And I think that’s a cop out, you can’t be ‘standing up to racism’, but only one specific kind. There are links, and we need to pull those out and make them clear, and say look, you’re against racism, and you’re coming out against it, this is how it is linked to Palestine, and you should be coming out for both.
Alfie: Did many groups visit the encampment and, in turn, extend their solidarity to you?
Alma: We had the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who were helpful in organising hot food deliveries so we never starved. Youth Front For Palestine were very present. But also Parents of Palestine came and organised a lot of family activities – ways to get younger children involved, thinking and learning. And also, people from outside of the university who would maybe never even set foot here before, who just came down to visit. Stand Up to Racism were not here because it’s not the right kind of racism for them. I think the SWP were around, but generally we don’t work with them. The Revolutionary Communist Party, they were founding members of the camp, so they are part of our Student-Staff Coalition, they were very helpful in our decision making.
Not everyone on the camp was a communist, not everyone agreed with their political views, but we could all line up and say, look, we are all here for the university to divest. In your own time, if you want to go and tell people about Marx and Lenin, you can do that – I think it worked. Sometimes there were moments where you were like, uhh, but it was fine. Everyone understood that we were all here for one thing and that we could only get it by working together.
Alfie: How has decision-making worked in the camp, in light of those potential disagreements coming from differing politics?
Alma: We had groups for certain things. Like there was a negotiations team, the press team, we had a food and supplies team, et cetera et cetera. But big camp decisions were all generally brought to an all-camp meeting – if you remember when we had the massive white gazebo there, in there – and it was proposed and we mostly voted on stuff, and no one’s vote carried more weight than any other. We tried to make sure it was an anti-hierarchical space, that everyone was equally involved in the decision making. There was the crisis team, so if something needed a response very quickly, you could do it as the crisis team and then bring it to the group and say, this is what happened, this is what we think we’re going to do next, what do you think? But in general, we tried to keep it as collective and as open as possible.
Like I said before, sometimes the meetings were really long but we tried to have them chaired, we tried to keep them as efficient as possible. Also, like, we were friends. By the end of it, we’d all been basically each other’s housemate for like two months. So sometimes the meetings are really long because we all just got sidetracked and we’re having the best time. But everything we tried to keep it as open and as transparent as possible, especially, I think, because what we were asking the Uni for was transparency. And you can’t be like, we want it from you, but we’re not going to do it ourselves.
Alfie: And what has been the reaction from the university management?
Alma: Poor! At the beginning, they were visiting us every day, doing what they called welfare checks, which was really just nosing around and seeing if they could find out our real names and what we were doing. But one thing that was blatant the whole time was that they just lied, constantly. I don’t know if you remember, we set up a second camp down by Aston Webb [Student Hub], and what we said [to management] was, all we want from you is a meeting, if you give us a meeting, we’ll take it down. And they were very clear, they said we will not meet with you until there are no tents on campus, until you’re gone. They put that in an email which went out to the whole student body. But then, since the camp has gone, they’ve said no, we never said that, we’re only gonna meet with agreed societies, and you’re not one of them. And the whole way through, I think they were speaking to the Guild, and they said if the camp agreed to meet with the Pro Vice-Chancellor, they would consider not taking us to court. And we said we would love to meet with the Pro Vice-Chancellor, give us a time and date. They never got back to us, and they took us to court.
We sent them constant emails saying all we want is a meeting to talk about investment, and for the relevant members of the university admin to be there so we can actually discuss divestment. And all they said was no. Then in their student emails, they were like, the camp have not been in communication with us, no one from the camp is willing to meet with university management. That’s the opposite of what was happening! I think they found it very easy to misrepresent what we were doing, because the people who read those emails and cared about them were not the people who were coming to the camp who understood why we were there.
Alfie: How did the camp removal happen, in the end?
Alma: It was like five in the morning, bailiffs showed up. We were served the day before with the removal order, and we understood that you have to wait 48 hours to send in bailiffs. But it was some kind of special bailiff where that doesn’t apply. The university management had been taunting us with the fact that bailiffs were coming and we had started to prepare. So they sent them in at five in the morning. We were on camp. We had someone on watch for them, and that person just shouted, bailiffs, and then everyone was away. They were unnecessarily violent. They laughed at the campers who were there, they thought it was really funny. There were a few dozen of them.
We knew it was happening, but we didn’t realise it was going to happen that day – we thought we had another 24 hours at least. So we had started to prepare in that we wanted to donate all the tents to Care for Calais, we wanted to donate toiletries and stuff we had left to homeless charities or people in Birmingham who could use them. We had so much food that will last a long time that we wanted to give to food banks, and it was all taken by the university and put in Guild security offices. They were so difficult about giving it back to us, they said we needed receipts, and it’s like, all my books that were in the lending library, I bought those years ago. Eventually, we managed to get everything that hadn’t previously been claimed – the food and the toiletries have already gone to relevant charities.
Hodge Jones & Alan were the legal firm who represented us, they were great. We got them very last minute. At the time of the first hearing, they weren’t officially our lawyers yet, all we wanted was an adjournment for that hearing. So our legal representative from the camp just had to go in and say, look, I have a letter from someone who isn’t my solicitor yet but will be, saying that they think they can defend this case, but they need time. Can you give us a bit of a break? And they said yes.
Alfie: Some encampments nationally have also faced far-right harassment. Did anything like that happen at Birmingham?
Alma: We had some weird incidents, nothing particularly egregious I don’t think. There were some counter protesters at the very beginning. They realised we weren’t going to engage with them and they got bored and left. They were standing around me, I think someone went over and said, look, we’re having a vigil, if you want to join us you’d be more than welcome. And they were like, bye. I think the university thought that we would do the same, that we would get bored and leave – especially when the weather got bad. And I think you could see whenever they came to visit us, they were getting annoyed we hadn’t left yet. I don’t think they understood that we actually cared. I think they thought we were doing it for fun or to be like, ah, look, you can’t get rid of us, and when it got difficult we would leave. I don’t think they ever actually thought about or assessed how much we cared and still care about what we were doing.
Alfie: Given it’s such a popular demand within certain sections of academia, reflected in the university’s recognition that you mentioned earlier with Stuart Hall, what does it mean to concretely decolonise a university campus?
Alma: This university, I imagine most neoliberal universities, they love to talk about decolonising their curriculum. I think an important part of what we did on the camp, and hopefully what everyone involved might take away, is that decolonisation on campus has to come with work. It’s not just a buzzword the university can put in their brochures; a lot of it means actually having quite uncomfortable conversations, especially for university management – they want to be like, this is a safe open campus, we don’t [just] teach white men anymore. But decolonisation actually has to look like not paying millions of pounds to build bombs that cause mass murder or atrocity in countries in the Global South. It’s not something you can sit in an office and say you’ve done. That was why we were pushing not just for divestment, but for transparency, for that open-book policy, because this university has a history of being really opaque with its students. Part of decolonising the university was that the people who go here – the students, the academic body, the support staff – they all have a right to see and have a say in what the money they generate for this institution is spent on. And if that is being spent on the manufacture of weapons of mass murder, that’s not decolonisation at all.
We’ve done freedom of information requests. They give you bits of what you want, nothing that would allow you to piece together a whole picture. We have been working on research into exactly where the university’s money goes and which partners it has, and how that money is funnelled into places like QinetiQ, Raytheon and Caterpillar. But they don’t make it easy for you to find it out. Our research was informed by students at the University of Bangor, who had a lot of success with FOIs. We’re hoping to produce some kind of booklet that says this is where your tuition fees really go.
Decolonisation is not a metaphor, and it’s not just a catchy phrase that Adam Tickell can wheel out on open day. He won’t engage with the concept of divestment, he won’t even engage with the most basic concept of free speech for staff and students on campus.
Alfie: What are the main lessons you’ve learned from building the camp?
Alma: I’ve been involved in campus organising before, but it was never this effective and never on this scale. So I think one of the biggest lessons we learned was that you can reach almost any student, as long as you approach them from a place where they understand. The amount of visitors we had was really not something I expected. I did kind of think when we started, that it was going to be the nine tents that we had at the beginning, and that people would visit us and be like, [this is] kind of weird. But they didn’t, and at the end I think we had 80 odd tents. There was a group chat for everyone who had slept over at least one night, and it was about 90 people. We found it actually so easy to reach out and relate to people and bring them in. And I think it’s such a different way of organising than, say, having a big stationary demo or doing a march around campus, and I think that was part of what made it successful, in that people stopped and listened and talked to us, and it wasn’t necessarily what I was expecting at the beginning.
We also learned how to build community and solidarity with other movements and struggles. Having speakers from other groups and different places, like Mukhtar Dar and Azzam Tamimi, who taught us about liberation movements like the Black Panthers, the Algerian liberation movement, the fight against South African apartheid or even the UK race riots in the 1980s helped us to understand how all these struggles are intertwined with Palestinian liberation. Having so much expertise, passion, and care on the camp really showed us how to work together as a collective to stand up for all of these struggles and keep the fight going, both on and off campus.
Also, I learned how horrible that grass is when it rains. That was a big lesson. It was disgusting [laughs].
Alfie: How did you manage that problem?
Alma: Wellies. We all had wellies, and then at one point we were like, if we go anywhere else on campus, we have to change our shoes, because uni admin will be able to identify us by the wellies.
Alfie: Is there anything important I’ve missed in the questions?
Alma: I can just read off what our demands were from the beginning. We tried to put them in every Instagram post we made, and we had a big poster of them on the camp:
We want divestment from all companies complicit in the funding of weapons manufacturers and the funding of the ongoing occupation in Palestine.
We want an open book policy so staff and students could see where the money they generated for their own institution was going.
We want the university to pledge to protect staff and students’ free speech on campus.
We want the university to pledge to help rebuild the economic infrastructure in Gaza, because during the time the camp was up we saw every educational institution in Gaza completely flattened. If our academics are saying they’re pledging solidarity to other academics around the world, that has to include Palestine.
We want more support for refugees entering here. The university pledged to protect and support Ukrainian scholars who were entering the country, we want an equal level of support for Palestinian students who want to study here. This demand also includes a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, in compliance with the demands of the BDS and PACBI campaigns.
Birmingham, 28 August 2024