Conclusion: good relations, free speech and political activism

This chapter begins by asking how sociology can respond to the abnormal and tragic transnational politics of Palestine-Israel. I discuss how my ethnographic approach challenges the violent abstractions of dominant political theories and offers a distinctive contribution to the field of the ‘anthropology of ethics’. I then address a series of questions arising from my research into campus struggles around Palestine-Israel. First, what social conditions enable ethical modes of relationality to develop between student activists? Second, how can a sense of ethical relations as responsive to the singularity and uncertainty of ‘the other’ come into tension with the political expression of moral commitment and coherent action? And how can more complex, localised ethico-political responses be scaled up to the level of more broadly mediated communications, in which reductionist, symbolic representations flourish? Grounding my responses to these questions in an ethnographic vignette, I show how an easily overlooked interpersonal encounter carries the potential to transfigure the seemingly intractable tensions between ‘free speech’, ‘good relations’ and ‘political activism’ within universities. In this way, this book concludes with an - at once - philosophical and ethnographic response to the continued presence of the Palestine-Israel conflict within British campuses.

Finding the words: towards ethical ethnography

This chapter explores ethnography as an ethical process. I begin with the relationship between ethics, epistemology and social theory in approaching questions of justice. Through a detailed account of the development of my fieldwork, I explore the ethical limitations of binary theoretical languages for communicating about the Palestine-Israel conflict and begin to imagine and inhabit alternative vocabularies, which I learnt in my relationships with students. By attending to themes of proximity and distance in fieldwork, I explore how, as ethnographers, we never fully know ourselves but rather engage in a process of learning. This insight is shaped and exemplified through an account of my own ambivalences, exclusions and transformations in the research process; I go through a process of renaming myself as I learn to engage with my research subjects differently. This becomes part of a questioning of moral traditions, embedded in the university itself, that call on people to abstract themselves from everyday relationships so that they can exist as rational, ‘objective’ moral selves. As I introduce alternative resources for approaching questions of ethics and justice, I also build on Judith Butler’s appeal towards post-secular diasporic traditions as offering important ethico-political resources for responding to the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Contested framings: democratic conflict and the public university

This chapter provides a brief history of the campus politics of Palestine-Israel in Britain alongside a genealogical account of how the stakes, boundaries and grammars of these struggles have been represented in the media, policy interventions and research. Taking up Nancy Fraser’s emphasis on the injustices produced by framings of justice, I show how these public representations have made liberal, secular and nationalist assumptions so that they have been unable to account for the limits of consensus or attend to students’ complex investments in the Palestine-Israel conflict. In the process, I situate these campus struggles in relation to historically evolving relations within British society, the emergent geo-politics of the ‘War on Terror’, and the legacies of the Holocaust and British imperialism. Finally, I consider how public constructions of this as an ‘imported’, ‘ethno-religious’ conflict have failed to address the role played by the British university in shaping these dynamics. I discuss how, in a post-imperial, globalising world, universities in Britain have become conflicted in their public role, creating different challenges for institutions operating in a fragmented higher education field. I conclude by explaining my multi-sited approach in this study, describing my selection of case study institutions and introducing these field-sites.

Introduction: unsettling subjects of justice and ethics

This chapter begins with an ethnographic account of the high profile student conflicts around free speech and racism which unfolded across UK campuses in 2008-9 in response to ‘Operation Cast Lead’. The discussion focuses on the unsettling quality of these events in order to introduce a number of key elements in the framing of this study. First, the chapter highlights how campus struggles around Palestine-Israel are not only constituted through competing discourses in the abstract but are also the locus of intense feelings, contradictory desires and visceral interpersonal encounters. Second, is argued that these raging campus conflicts over Palestine-Israel involve the destabilisation of established spatial boundaries under conditions of globalisation and so can be helpfully connected to Nancy Fraser’s theory of ‘abnormal justice’. Third, by highlighting how this case is also the focus of disputed historical claims, the chapter introduces helpful resonances with aesthetic notions of the tragic. The chapter concludes by introducing some key interlocutors - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell and Veena Das - who will help with a key task of this book: to develop an ethnographic imagination attentive to movements between the discursive/embodied and public/personal dimensions of democratic life.

University melodramas: the claim of reason

This chapter explores the moral traditions that have shaped the university with its idealised vision of rational debate by offering a detailed account of the sources, dynamics and consequences of a public debate about the academic boycott of Israel. Showing how this university sought to materialise a liberal model of communication governed by rules of neutral, rational debate and secular norms, I highlight the paradox inherent in this attempt to dramatically perform communicative rationality. The discussion then situates this need to display an idealised image of the university committed to free speech within the context of wider pressures associated with neo-liberalism and securitisation. The final section of the chapter then explores the consequences of the academic boycott event, which fixed participants in rigid, partisan positions. I argue that, in the process of affirming this rationalist self-image, the university disavowed its own historical involvements in colonial oppression and ongoing inequalities, so concealing relationships of power. Bringing my analysis of the dramaturgy of this event together with interview material, I show how this polarised debate repressed and shamed aspects of students’ political commitments which could not be voiced in these terms.

Postscript: unfinished conversations

In the summer of 2013, after I had begun to draft this book, I started to reflect on the ethics of my writing process. How did my commitment to responsive ethnography relate to questions about the ethics of ethnographic representation? Was the process through which I produced these representations of students itself dialogical? How did the ways in which I imagined students’ responses shape what I had written about them? Were the people I was writing about invited to reflect on and respond to my representations of them?...

Ordinary ethics: conversation, friendship and democratic possibilities

This chapter foregrounds my approach to ethics as a ‘new’ ethnographic object. I show how an attentive ethnographic sensibility can uncover forms of interpersonal relationality, which diverge from a politics of interminable opposition. Learning from Veena Das’ work, I turn away from the most visible campus ‘events’ and toward a seemingly mundane student meeting in order to address the following question: how, in a politically polarised context, do friendships and alternative sociabilities become possible? I offer an ethnographic account of a small scale gathering of students involved in an ‘Israel-Palestine Forum’ at Redbrick University. Tracing the interpersonal and institutional conditions of this meeting, I show how its participants cultivated practices of speaking and listening, which enabled us to engage with each other as uncertain, ambivalent and fragmented subjects. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ethics of ‘parrhesia’ and Stanley Cavell’s insights into the pedagogic dimensions of democratic relationships, I explore how risk-taking, trust and singular friendships enabled the tragic histories of Palestine-Israel to be spoken and reflected upon. The chapter concludes with some comparative insights in relation to my three fieldsites, highlighting how the differential impacts of socio-economic changes to higher education can limit these democratic possibilities within campuses.

Tragic action: ambiguous passions and misrecognition

This chapter focuses on a campus meeting with a controversial Palestinian journalist at which escalating accusations of anti-Semitism and fascism culminated in physical violence. Drawing on the work of Simon Critchley, I frame this event as a ‘tragic’ conflict, in which the claims of entangled past and present sufferings came to be expressed as a passionate refusal of recognition. Attending closely to the linguistic, somatic and emotional dynamics of this meeting, I show how it culminated in the destabilisation of moral distinctions and the collapsing of spatial and temporal boundaries, including a blurring of distinctions between victims and perpetrators, a making-present of past traumas and of seemingly distant forms of violence. Drawing on interview material to deepen my psychosocial analysis, I explore how repressed feelings of shame and aggressive desires, associated with these entanglements, came to be acted out in the violent culmination of this meeting. The concluding section draws this analysis together with the preceding chapter to develop an explanation for the repetitive, circular quality of melodramatic and tragic campus conflicts over time, including the role of public media and the logics of spectatorship in this process.