One of two perspectives on the Bristol University occupation which appeared on the research blog, Mała Kultura Współczesna, earlier this month.
Joanna Tidy: The Performance of Security
I am going to start by quoting part of an informal conversation I had with the head of university security towards the end of the occupation:
Me: So, perhaps the Vice Chancellor might come down and speak to us now that you know we are not…
Jerry Woods [head of security]: Terrorists.
From the first moments of the occupation, fear was the principle reaction of University senior management. Our occupation of a space was termed ‘violent’, senior management told us that the staff working in the building were afraid of us and we heard that the Vice Chancellor and Registrar were ‘freaked out’ by what we had done. In the University’s eyes we were terrorising University staff and our student peers for ends specific to our ‘vocal minority’ agenda. The management did not (or decided not to) understand the concept of an occupation and sought to marginalise and delegitimize what we had done through performances of security which served no pragmatic purpose but were instead designed to reinforce a very specific narrative. These performances of security took a variety of forms but I want to emphasise two here; the spectacle of a suspension of normality to produce a climate of instability and fear, and the surveillance of occupiers to construct us as aberrant, isolated and extreme.
The Suspension of Normality and the Spectacle of Aberration
Key to the management’s narrative of us as a threatening vocal minority was the public closure of the entire building in which we had occupied just one room. The front doors 
were shut, and a sign informed anyone trying to get in that access to the building was limited due to a student sit-in. Security guards patrolled the perimeter, and stood on watch at doors. From the outside the building appeared to be completely shut down and off-limits. Key to the narrative of the threatening vocal minority was the production of the idea of a suspension of normality; a highly unusual, unstable and deviant event in the face of which the only logical response was a highly securitised one. Inside the building however, things carried on much as before. Staff and occupiers used the back entrance, people carried on with their normal activities and most of the usual functioning of the building was maintained – but crucially, hidden from public view.
The List
During the occupation, management allowed ‘original occupiers’ to come and go through the much less visible back entrance of the building. The journey from the back entrance to the occupied Senate Room was the main point around which security was performed to construct occupiers as the threatening terrorisers of the university. Occupiers entering the building would be processed through a series of (up to three) checkpoints. University security quickly produced a document which became known as ‘The List’; a record of names of known occupiers and the meticulously noted times of their passage through each checkpoint. These surveillance practices were not about the collection of data for any meaningful purpose; instead they were part of the spectacle of marginalisation. Occupiers were escorted between checkpoints by University security, using a route around the building which would change from day to day or even hour to hour and which was typically circuitous; we were taken up and down flights of stairs and through a number of card-entry-only doors when the actual distance between the back door and the occupied room was very short and straightforward. The emphasis was on process, on the suspension of our usual access rights as students, and on functionless rituals of securitised control which remade us as aberrant, trespasser-detainees in our own university.
Producing the Possible
These performances were a crucial part of the management of the occupation by the university. They operated to remake the occupation and occupiers in a way the university could deal with most easily, and define the possible in terms of dialogue. We were placed in an ideological cordon sanitaire: isolated spatially and apparently intellectually. Ultimately however, this strategy of marginalisation did not work. Contesting these performances, the positions which informed them and the narrative they produced became a point around which solidarity from other students, staff and the wider public mobilised and distilled into positive dialogue.
Whilst the public performance of security did not, in general terms, alter over the two weeks, at an informal level there was a thaw in the initially hard line taken by the management; two events were held in the Senate Room and eventually the fear seemed to subside into a resigned disapproval, backed with the threat of a court injunction. They still refused to recognise that what we had done was in any way legitimate, constructive or – fundamentally – understandable. In terms of our encounters with the management the only real movement seemed to be a grudging acceptance that, as Jerry Woods said in the conversation I opened with, we weren’t actually terrorists. Of course, the occupation had a number of objectives and successes and being chummy with the senior management had definitely never been on our ‘to-do’ list. However, effectively challenging the management’s position, performance and narrative was, and functioned as a lens through which to view the wider problem.
It is important to note finally that the reaction I have described was not in any way inevitable. In the vast majority of other student occupations over the past month or so university managements have responded very differently. Many occupations have had open access and most occupations have been visited by their institution’s Vice Chancellor. At Senate House, the University senior management took the decision to respond with securitisation rather than dialogue and it didn’t work for them.
