Ten years after the conclusion of South Africa’s Fallist movements, universities across the world are once again sites of profound political rupture. From Rhodes Must Fall to the Gaza Solidarity Encampments, student uprisings are reshaping how knowledge is produced, how institutional power is contested, and how decolonial futures are imagined.
This panel begins from Fallism as an emergent African decolonial theory and praxis, and traces its transnational afterlives in contemporary student movements—including what has become known as the Student Intifada. Rather than treating these struggles as isolated or reactive, we approach student activism as a form of collective theorizing: a mode of epistemic disobedience that challenges the colonial, racial, and capitalist foundations of higher education.
We invite papers that engage student movements as sites of intellectual production, institutional rupture, and political imagination across Africa and its diasporas. While grounded in African studies, the panel welcomes comparative and transnational perspectives that place Fallism in dialogue with campus struggles around Palestine, racial justice, Indigenous sovereignty, austerity, and anti-authoritarian resistance.
Possible questions and themes include:
How has Fallism traveled, transformed, or resurfaced in contemporary student movements globally?
What does a ten-year retrospective on Fallism reveal about the current moment of campus rupture?
How do student uprisings generate alternative epistemologies and pedagogical practices?
In what ways do universities function as colonial, corporate, or carceral institutions—and how do students expose these structures?
How are concepts such as apartheid, Nakba, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism mobilized within campus struggles?
What forms of transnational solidarity emerge between African, Afro-diasporic, and Palestinian movements?
How do repression, surveillance, and disciplinary governance shape activist knowledge production?
What futures of higher education are being rehearsed through occupations, encampments, mutual aid, and popular education?
We welcome empirical, theoretical, historical, and creative approaches from scholars working in African studies, education, anthropology, political theory, sociology, history, diaspora studies, and decolonial thought. Contributions may focus on Africa, the Global South, diasporic contexts, or comparative cases.
Format will consist of 20-minute presentations followed by collective discussion.
Please submit a 250–300 word abstract and short bio by March 12, 2026. Abstracts can be emailed in MS Word format to kayumjhb@gmail.com by March 12, 2026.
We particularly encourage submissions from early-career scholars, activist-scholars, and those working at the intersection of institutional critique and emancipatory practice.
