Diana Volpe on Divest Borders - Reflections on Migrant Solidarity Activism on and off Campus

Abstract: University-led representation programmes, decolonising curriculum workshops, diversity and inclusion programmes have started to clog students’ inboxes in the last ten years. They go through complicated processes to gain nominal University of Sanctuary status, as well as seeking exorbitant tuition fees from international students, while continuing to be complicit in exercising border controls on campus. At the same time, they invest and take money from the border and military-digital industrial complex responsible for profiting off migrant suffering through detention, surveillance and deportation of people on the move.  

In the aftermath of Rhodes Must Fall, it seems that university students have lost the momentum or energy to challenge old colonial institutions. This presentation is an auto-ethnographic account as a (white, European) migrant student engaged in activism on and off campus, challenging the involvement of the university in the border industry. It seeks to reflect on my experience founding and running a Divest Borders campaign in the University of Oxford, and collaborating with local actors in anti-detention campaigns against the reopening and expansion of the local Campsfield House detention centre. It aims to reflect on the particular challenges that have come with organising as and with migrant students and university staff in the context of a particularly difficult university environment that is both characterised by highly decentralised systems of finance management and a famously reluctant university board against getting rid of old colonial statues, still proudly standing on the forefront of college entrances. It also wants to reflect on the importance of forging local alliances and networks across the activist migrant solidarity movements that move beyond and across the university as an institution.  

Is it possible to challenge the university as a neo-liberal institution in today’s UK landscape of funding and understanding of education? Divest Borders as a campaign is often met with utilitarian arguments about investments and profit which may bring more scholarships for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Is it too late to separate the right to education from neoliberal logics? Can universities go back to being sites of radical knowledge production, or did they ever hold this position at the forefront of social change? I would like to take this time to reflect on these questions in light of my experience. Divest Borders is an ongoing campaign on the Oxford campus.  

Bio: Diana Volpe (they/them) is a DPhil candidate in International Development at the University of Oxford. Their research focuses on the ethics of outsourcing of migration control operations in the Mediterranean, and the legitimation process of certain policies of cooperation between Italy and Libya within the Italian political sphere. They hold a BA in Politics and International Relations from University College Dublin, and a MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration from the University of Oxford. They are the founder of the Oxford chapter of the Divest Borders campaign and a Student Trustee for People and Planet. They are also the managing editor of the Border Criminologies blog.