When I arrived at the University of Groningen in Netherlands on March 18 to speak on feminist political ecology, I was met not with a classroom but a picket line. The university was on strike. My hosts, faculty in the Department of Spatial Planning and Environment, had invited me to lecture on planning for degrowth, drawing from my research on care and commoning at the intersection of urban redevelopment and land policy. But when the strike was announced, I was offered a choice: cancel my visit, or give an open lecture at the Strike Fair in the city centre. It didn’t take me long to decide.

Because just as much as it is an academic's job to teach and do research, it is also the duty and responsibility to stand with university communities across campuses that are under attack. Whether we’re facing devastating budget cuts, censorship and retaliation against “activist” scholars, or the criminalization of students protesting genocide—this moment calls for resistance. To borrow the words of Jane Fonda in her recent lifetime achievement speech: “This is our documentary moment. This is it, and it’s not a rehearsal.”

As someone whose academic path has moved through the UK, the US, and now Switzerland—and as a citizen of Turkey—I know first hand that there is no real “safe haven” for critical scholarship under authoritarian neoliberalism. But that precarity, even when it feels individualized or temporary, is systemic. Across countries and campuses, we are witnessing a coordinated assault on the institution of higher education, especially in their function as places for collective knowledge production, critical thought, and resistance to rising authoritarianism.

What’s at stake is not simply the University—as in the building, or the job—but the university as an institution of capitalist social reproduction. And this is where I want to suggest something that may sound controversial in the times of outrageous insults, but is in fact deeply grounded in the history and praxis of feminist struggle: Abolish the university!

Abolish the University?
A call for “abolish the university” is not to argue for destruction. It is a call for transformation. In this sense, it parallels Sophie Lewis’s provocation to “abolish the family.” In her 2022 book Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, Lewis makes the case that the nuclear family is not only inadequate for providing care, but is in fact a key institution of patriarchal capitalism: private, coercive, and deeply unequal. Abolition, for her, is not about erasure, but about freeing up our capacities to care, love, and live collectively.
The university, too, is such an institution. Like the family, it is central to the reproduction of labor power—not just through credentialing and skills training, but through ideological conditioning, class sorting, and disciplining of bodies and minds. It is deeply patriarchal, riddled with racial and colonial hierarchies, and governed increasingly by logics of competition, productivity, and austerity. As radical scholars have long noted, the institution of University is not outside extractive capitalism—it is part of the very ideological infrastructure that sustains it.
So when we call for solidarity to defend universities today, we must ask: which university are we standing the grounds for?
The neoliberal academy is already a hollowed-out version of itself. The ideal of a public university—open, inclusive, collaborative—has been systematically undermined. Universities today are project-based grant farms, turning scholars into managerial labor chasing competitive funding. Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts largely remained tokenistic; before it largely become the taget of alt-right politics. Academic buildings are being shut down, research time eaten by bureaucratic metrics, and collegial life spatially disintegrated under the banner of “flexibility.” The university is dissolving not only intellectually, but materially.
Budget cuts, then, are not isolated incidents. They are capitalist enclosures. They are the privatization of the remaining bits of knowledge commons, the extraction of public resources, and the foreclosure of spaces where collective futures can be imagined and built. As Stuart Hodkinson reminds us in his work on urban commons, such enclosures are not only economic but also epistemic and spatial. The university is being de-commoned—physically, politically, intellectually.

Toward the Pluriversity
But to say that the university is a site of reproduction for capitalist society is not to say it has no transformative potential. Quite the opposite. As with the family, abolition here means clearing space for something else to grow—something based not on private accumulation, but on care, conviviality, and commons.
Scholars of decoloniality have given us a name for this alternative: the pluriversity.
The pluriversity is not simply a more diverse university. It is a fundamentally different kind of institution—one that accommodates “ecologies of knowledge” (Boaventura de Sousa Santos), grounded in an “epistemology of conviviality” (Francis Nyamnjoh), and committed to re-membering and re-humanizing knowledge production (Ngugi wa Thiong’o). A pluriversity, in this sense, is anti-hierarchical, anticolonial, anti-patriarchal—and organized around the principles of radical care and justice.
In a pluriversity, knowledge is not commodified but shared; not instrumentalized but nurtured. It is rooted in community, oriented toward collective well-being, and open to multiple ways of knowing. Rather than reproducing dominant subjectivities, it cultivates spaces of unlearning and co-creation. It becomes a commons.

Reclaiming the University as Commons
Commons are not simply “shared resources.” They are social relations: practices of co-creation, co-maintenance, and co-governance. To reimagine the university as a commons means to reclaim it not as a site of service delivery or workforce production, but as a living infrastructure for the reproduction of life.
In the context of higher education, this means rejecting the language of “competitive edge” or “global excellence” as metrics of value. Arguments like “budget cuts will make us less competitive internationally” or “humanities are cheap, we should keep them” are not just ineffective—they are complicit. They accept the premise that value lies in utility, efficiency, or market relevance. What we need instead is a radical defense: one that starts from a commitment to knowledge as a right, not a privilege; as a resource, not a commodity.
This also means organizing our universities not just as sites of knowledge production, but as sites of knowledge commoning. That means preserving and creating physical spaces where students and scholars can gather without surveillance or performance metrics. It means resisting the fragmentation of academic labor into project-based silos. And it means building institutional cultures where care is central—not an add-on, but a method, a value, and a goal.

Radical Care as Method and Horizon
To make this shift, we must center care—not as charity, nor as managerial wellbeing—but as a political methodology.
Feminist scholars like Joan Tronto define care as a species activity: the ongoing effort to maintain, repair, and continue our world so that all may live in it as well as possible. Tronto identifies five phases of care: caring about (noticing needs), caring for (taking responsibility), care-giving (the work itself), care-receiving (evaluating the outcome), and caring with (embedding care in a democratic ethos). When applied to the institution of university, this framework invites us to radically reimagine what academic labor is, and who it is for.
Sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn expands this view of care to include three interrelated domains: direct personal care; maintenance of physical surroundings; and the weaving and reweaving of the social fabric. In short: care is not only about individuals—it is about infrastructures, relationships, and collective life.
In my own work, I’ve called for care-full municipalism: a framework for reclaiming municipal governance as a means of resisting the enclosures of caring capacity and spaces for care. I now extend this to care-full scholarship as an agenda—a mode of academic practice that resists extraction, embraces interdependence, and seeks to transform the university from a site of patriarchal-capitalist accumulation into a commons for collective thriving.
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Struggle at the University as Previsioning
Universities are not only sites of knowledge production. They are sites of social reproduction: they prepare, shape, and reproduce the subjectivities and institutions of our world. That is why budget cuts and neoliberal restructuring matter. They are not just matters of fiscal choices of moving funding from here to there. They are political acts—enclosures of the collective means to reproduce life otherwise.
And this is where the family/university analogy becomes most powerful. Both institutions are central to reproducing labor power. Both are in crisis. And both, as feminist family abolitionists insist, must be transformed—root and branch—if we are to build a future based on justice and care. The hatchet clears the way, but the seed is what we must plant. Abolition is not enough; we need alternatives that can grow into new socio-ecologies.

Antonio Gramsci wrote on prevision to emphasise its difference from foresight or prediction. It is a political method. It means intervening in the present with a clear analysis of its forces, in order to shift the trajectory of the future. It is, in Gramsci’s words, “the only scientifically possible way of knowing.”
In other words, we cannot predict what comes next. But we can act to make it otherwise.
The university strikes in the Netherlands, the univeristy occupations in Greece last year, the ongoing university boycotts in Turkey, like many others across the world, are not simply about preserving the university as it is. It is about imagining and struggling for what it could become. Not a competitive firm. Not a privatized shell. But a commons. A pluriversity. A seedbed for new worlds.

And that struggle—like care, like knowledge—is collective. There is no escape from it. But there is everything to gain by stepping in, together.

This article is published in Warscapes in June 2016.

How the Gezi uprising transformed citizenship in the contemporary neoliberal city 
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This month marks three years since the initial surge of the Gezi movement, and “June” has since become synonymous with progressive opposition to the authoritarian government In June 2013, a relatively small "Occupy" protest against the replacement of Gezi Park with a shopping mall in the central district of Istanbul triggered wide-ranging public demonstrations in Turkey. June is also Pride Month. Many people’s experiences and heightened awareness through the Gezi movement also played an important role in popularizing Pride parades in Turkey. Gezi protesters joined the 2013 Pride, and the event swelled to nearly 100,000 attendees, making it the biggest Pride ever held in Turkey. There is a direct ideological link between the two, and this link helps us to formulate and discuss the performative aspects of insurgent citizenship. A closer look at the invented spaces of activism in Gezi Park in its third anniversary helps us to appreciate all that is subsumed under Pride taking over the streets of Istanbul this month.
The immediate goal of the Gezi movement was to defend the park and to protect it from demolition, but it transformed into weeks-long mass demonstrations against the government’s undemocratic rule at the local and national levels. In this process, Gezi Park functioned as both the physical and political space of activism, where citizens collectively defended the public against the private interests of government-sponsored capital. Social groups that had previously been hostile or at least viewed each other with great suspicion – members of trade unions and white collar workers, pious Muslims and anarchists, Turkish nationalists and socialists - stood with each other against the authoritarian government committed to restructuring their city. 



The Gezi uprising worked to transform citizenship in the contemporary neoliberal city. This urban contestation shows that beyond the invited spaces of participation, invented spaces of activism play a critical role in asserting citizens’ rights to the city and counter-development of exclusionary urban projects.
The outburst of urban inhabitants over a redevelopment project in downtown Istanbul (Taksim Square and Gezi Park) halted fast-moving real estate capital in its tracks. Citizens employed innovative strategies to claim their right to the city and public space. These strategies can be interpreted as performative aspects of insurgent citizenship. Critical scholars of urban citizenship interpret citizenship as tangible practices that involve claiming and redefining substantive rights of citizens to the city – to produce, inhabit, and appropriate space they inhabit.1 
This formulation of citizenship from below and through citizens’ practices radically departs from liberal-democratic expectations of citizenship as an intangible collection of rights, duties, and liabilities defined under a legal framework of membership in the nation state.2 
The Gezi movement needs to be understood as citizens’ practices of urban citizenship launched in response to neoliberal aggression and the assault on the public sphere – that is, a response to a form of economic, political, and spatial violence in which the legal procedures and market-driven planning principles are implicated. To combat the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism on people’s lives and livelihoods, government and market-sanctioned channels for citizen participation are insufficient. 
These invited spaces of formal participation created and/or sanctioned by authorities are often meant to contain the public interest and energy. To be heard and taken into account as citizens, people in Istanbul instead moved beyond invited spaces to invent new spaces and forms of action. Symbolic and performative aspects of insurgent citizenship practices are creative spatial practices that help to destabilize what is considered common sense in urban development and expand the realms of possibility and imagination for (re)development of urban space.
Invented spaces of activism in the Gezi movement are effective insurgent citizenship practices with a clear – although not necessarily guaranteed - urban development outcome. These outcomes vary from the proposing of alternative urban development scenarios to simply the defense of existing urban spaces against the onslaught of aggressive profit-driven and market-oriented development projects. There are three particular cases of insurgent citizenship practice in the invented spaces of activism in the context of Gezi Park: The Resisting Piano, The Standing Man, and the Table on Earth.

The Resisting Piano
On June 13, 2013, German pianist Davide Martello gave an open-air recital in the center of Taksim Square. Gezi protesters and passerby enjoyed the piano recital for over 14 hours. The event quickly turned into an open mic, with participation of other musicians, performance artists, and audience members. The piano quickly became a powerful symbol of the transnational solidarity developed around Gezi Park. The piano was later confiscated by police following the raid on Gezi Park on Erdogan’s orders. Following the “detention” of the piano, people started referring to it as the “Resisting Piano” of Gezi. 
The piano recital is a part of the Gezi politics that “emerges where it is not supposed to be”.3 This insurgent act is a place-based tactic that resists the proposed demolition of Gezi Park and reinvents the square by giving it a new meaning through its imaginative use of public space.

Standing Man
On June 18, 2013, a young man started an unorthodox form of protest in Taksim Square: standing still. He stood for eight consecutive hours in the square facing the Ataturk Cultural Center (AKM)4, which bore wall-sized posters of Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state, with Turkish flags on each side. The act of standing while facing this figure provoked a collective memory of the foundations of modern Turkey that resonated with many of the Gezi protesters. Within the first hour, hundreds of people joined the Standing Man, and in a few hours news about the Standing Man of Taksim spread across the country through social media. Copycat protests cropped up all over the country in solidarity with the man, who literally stood up for the ideals of the Gezi movement.
Standing Man challenged the police state’s codes for what constitutes acts of resistance, and bewildered the police forces on how to handle the supposedly passive protests of masses “just standing”. When citizens are excluded from meaningful participation, deprived of their basic rights of existence and dignified lives and livelihoods in cities, then collective assemblies of their bodies in one place is not only an expression of rage but also a refusal to be disposed. Protesters following the lead of the Standing Man emphasized the ‘thereness’ of the people as individuals and collectively represented the masses that refuse to be discarded. 

Table on Earth
On July 9, 2013, after more than a month had passed since the start of the Gezi protests, people of Gezi gathered around the Table on Earth for the first day of Ramadan. Many expected that the nature of Ramadan would inevitably end the Gezi protests. Instead, the people of Gezi reinvented the space of the most popular street in Istanbul, Istiklal Avenue (Taksim Square stands at one end of Istiklal Avenue), blending the ideals of Gezi movement and the rituals of Ramadan. Following the public call made jointly by the two observant Muslim groups of Gezi protesters (Anti-capitalist Muslims and Revolutionary Muslims), people occupied the light-railroad crossing on Istiklal Avenue to break their fast. The function of the railroad was reinterpreted as a form of a dinner table, hosting hundreds of people sharing their food with one another. 
Gathered around the Table on Earth, as they named it, some were breaking their fast while others were only there to show their solidarity with the observing members of the Gezi movement. The railroad probably formed one of the longest and most diverse dinner tables ever set, in the middle of the most vibrant neighborhood in the city and surrounded by high-end luxury restaurants and bars. 
The Table on Earth is rooted in the idea of being equal on the very same platform, sharing and having access to the same goods under the same conditions. This symbolic act can be seen as an effort to experience real democracy that begins from the assumption of equality.5 In that respect, insurgent acts at Gezi in general and Table on Earth in particular can be interpreted as a ‘path to democracy’ in which equality is a starting point. People sitting along the Table on Earth occupied the tramway and disrupted the flow of Istiklal Avenue, which is a key site of capital flows in Istanbul. By disrupting business as usual, people of Gezi created an alternative use for the space to reclaim their rights to their city. 

Producing new spaces for resistance and solidarity, people claim and practice their right to the city, a “right to change themselves by changing the city” and this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanization.6 The performative acts of protest in the Gezi movement provide empirical evidence about the power of people to develop a public sphere from below using the public space both as a cause and as a means for practicing new forms of citizenship. 
The opposition against the use of public space for private interest became influential when people from diverse backgrounds united around a basic claim of a right to exist in the city as equal members of society. These acts were performed individually and collectively to expand the uses of the urban space that capital aims to limit to those with greater economic resources—excluding the public in favor of enhancing private benefits. We can interpret these insurgent acts as practices of development—unorthodox and innovative, yet concrete in their spatial outcome and gain. 



This piece was adapted from a chapter co-authored by Faranak Miraftab: The Invented Spaces of Activism: Gezi Park and Performative Practices of Citizenship, in Daniel Hammett and Jean Grugel (eds.) The Handbook of International Development. Palgrave MacMillan.

1 Merrifield 2014; Harvey 2012; Mayer 2009; Miraftab 2009; Irazabal 2008; Holston and Appadurai 1999; Purcell 2003.
2 Marshall, T.H. 1950.
3 Swyngedouw 2015.
4 AKM is also a part of the dispute over the Taksim Square redevelopment. It is home to multiple stages for performance arts, concert halls, and galleries. Besides its functional value, it has great symbolic value for Istanbul since it is associated with the modernization project led by the founding father of the modern Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Erdogan as the prime minister at the time also declared plans involving demolition of AKM and replacement of it with a ‘baroque’ opera house.
5 Purcell 2015.
6 Harvey 2008.