Resignifying occupation: territorialization, place and transgression in the anti-corporatization movement at Seoul National University

ABSTRACT

Occupation is a common strategy, including in anti-austerity movements. This paper examines the 2011 occupation at Seoul National University (SNU), which had an ambivalent position on anti-austerity activism, and mixed outcomes. The student occupiers held an occupied administrative building longer than previous student occupations, and their tactics were taken up by student activists around South Korea. However, the SNU occupation failed to influence the university’s corporatization. Both the successes and failures of the SNU occupation related to their resignification of ‘occupation’ relative to their subjectivity as SNU students, and from the way they enacted territorialization of the occupied administrative building. The resignification served to mobilize SNU students, but also masked the occupation’s leaders’ failure to negotiate the differences in their goals and refusal to connect with other constituencies against university austerity.

KEYWORDS:

• occupation
• territorialization
• place-making
• transgression
• affective structure
• student protests
• austerity

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank the interviewees for their time and insights; Baegyoon Park for advice on the research; Hyejin Yoon, Woonsup Choi and two anonymous reviewers for their comments; and the copyright holders of the figures for their permissions.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.