Translocal assemblage: student activism and social movement learning in Pakistan

ABSTRACT

This article offers a spatial understanding of learning in social action by analysing the case of Progressive Students Collective (PSC), a Leftist student organisation based in Lahore, Pakistan. Under the umbrella of PSC, there is a growing progressive social movement among students in higher education who engage in alternative forms of learning and knowledge-building, thereby nurturing local identities, enabling new social relationships, and creating possibilities for different forms of resistance. Despite a four-decade-long official ban on student unions, students in Pakistan continue to articulate campus-based and global issues through staged demonstrations and social media strategies that expose unjust social issues prevalent at the institutional, local, and national levels. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted between 2021 and 2023 in Lahore, Pakistan, to understand the spatiality of multidirectional crossings and dimensions of student activism. By applying a translocal assemblage analytic, the paper illustrates how activists acquire and disseminate knowledge across boundaries of time and space. Findings suggest that migration, mobility and knowledge exchange in physical and virtual spaces, shape translocal materialities for student activists. It fosters interconnectedness across various localities on both material and symbolic levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Translocal
• assemblage
• social movement learning
• student activism
• Pakistan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Ethical approval for the fieldwork in 2021 was obtained from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at University of Massachusetts Amherst (Approval No. 2720). The study protocol was reviewed and approved on 01/06/2021.

2 Ethical approval for the fieldwork in 2021 was obtained from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at University of Massachusetts Amherst (Approval No. 3870). The study protocol was reviewed and approved on 17/11/2022.

3 Sahibzada, I.A. 2021. The Frontier Gandhi: My Life and Struggle: The Autobiography of Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Lotus Collection, Roli Books. Commonly known as Bacha Khan, Abdul Ghaffar Khan was a prominent political leader who advocated for Pashtun rights through nonviolent resistance. His role was significant in the Independence Movement, and he continued his political activism post-partition, advocating for social reform and the right to education for the disadvantaged Pashtun community.

4 Jafri, Q. 2021. The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) in Pakistan. International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) is civil resistance movement founded by eight students in Dera Ismail Khan in 2014. It represents the Pashtun ethnic minority concentrated in northwestern Pakistan and bordering areas of Afghanistan. The PTM aims to raise awareness and seek justice for Pashtuns affected by war, militancy, landmines, and alleged human rights violations such as extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and discrimination by security forces.

5 Across the border in India, student activists have also been vilified by the state for opposing the state's occupation of Kashmir, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), caste discrimination against Dalits and Hindu nationalism entrenched in Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) government.

6 Shah Inayat is a 17th-century revolutionary socialist Sufi from Sindh. He laid the foundations of socialism in pre-colonial India and established a commune with his land-to-the-tillers philosophy.

7 Sibte Hasan, commonly known as Pakistan's Gramsci, was a Marxist thinker, scholar-activist, and founding member of the Progressive Writers Association. His renowned works include literary writings and social analyses using historical materialism and dialectics principles.

8 On 16 December 2014, militants of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) attacked the Army Public School in Peshawar. Targeting students and teachers, they claimed 144 lives, including 132 school-going children, making it one of the country's deadliest acts of terrorism.

9 Mashal Khan, a university student at Abdul Wali Khan University in Mardan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, was accused of blasphemy which resulted in a mob brutally lynching him on April 13, 2017. The incident sparked nationwide and international outrage, shedding light on the issues of vigilantism and misuse of blasphemy laws.

10 Noor Mukadam's brutal murder in 2021 raised widespread concerns about gender-based violence and sparked nationwide protests for the protection of women's rights in Pakistan.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by a Graduate School Fieldwork Grant from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Notes on contributors

Mariam P. Sheikh

Mariam Parvez Sheikh is a Ph.D. candidate at the College of Education, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. Her current research focuses on how young students in Pakistan's higher education produce alternative knowledge as they articulate various struggles, including climate justice, feminism and anti-capitalism. In doing so, it examines how they expose gender, ethnic and class inequities through their struggle for social justice. She holds a master's in Education and International Development from University College London (UCL), United Kingdom and a BSc. Hons. in Economics and Political Science from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).