Three co-editors put this special issue together. Two remain anonymous due to the unevenly distributed repression that places them at greater risk.

In the weeks and months after Israel’s U.S.-supported war in Gaza began in October 2023, groups of students began pitching tents on college campus lawns across the United States and the world, demanding a ceasefire and divestment from military companies. These encampments, escalating in April 2024, were the crest of months of student activism opposing Israel’s occupation, war, and genocide—campus activism that was arguably the most significant in a generation, at least in the United States, leading to highly-politicized scrutiny and the downfall of elite university presidents. The initial encampments—some spare, others sprawling—were met with swift and often violent campus and city police responses. Others endured longer before eventually succumbing to dismantlement. This collection serves as a counter-archive, seeking to recover traces of these embodied, ephemeral encampments, as a new academic year in the United States has begun with new restrictions on protest (and even the firing of a pro-Palestine faculty member), and as Israel’s devastating war and genocide in Gaza continues and expands, most recently and destructively in the West Bank and Lebanon.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to all the students, faculty, staff, and community activists who supported, participated in, and documented the encampments, and to those who shared their experiences with us all here. Thank you also to Kate Herman for her responsive and painstaking editing work in bringing this series beautifully and quickly into production.