CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Drath, Charlotte |
|---|---|
| Title | Producing spaces: The spatial politics of the student occupation #OccupyKossuth |
| Summary | In Winter 2018, students of the Central European University, an American institution of higher education located in Budapest, conducted a week-long occupation named #OccupyKossuth on Kossuth Square, the square in front of the Hungarian parliament. While hosting a variety of academic and cultural events, the space of the occupation was turned into an ‘Open University’ as a protest against the impending danger of CEU being kicked out of the country. One year earlier, a discriminative amendment to the Hungarian Higher Education Law had threatened the university’s existence in Budapest. Exploring and making sense of how the lived experiences of the occupation, as a nuanced and reflected way of grasping the political world we inhabit and co-constitute, the present thesis contributes to questions of possibilities to alternative lives to be lived in space-taking forms of political dissent. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the politics of space, I explore the significance of ‘space’ in political dissident, in particular in regard to how the ‘production of spaces’ and sociospatial relations offer potential for genuinely alternative politics. Therefore, I interview nine occupiers from #OccupyKossuth and craft a collective narrative of the occupation, which renders the internal social processes more precisely tangible. I conclude that the transformation of lived experiences of #OccupyKossuth allows for seeing practices of the protest as radically enacted alternatives to the current neoliberal hegemonic power structure, thus contesting them. |
| Supervisor | Strausz, Erszébet |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/drath_charlotte.pdf |
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