Dispatches from Pepper Spray University: Privatization, Repression, and Revolts

This essay situates the pepper spraying of student protesters at the University of California, Davis, and the Occupy protests in the University of California system within a larger global economic and political apparatus that has defunded public higher education and suppressed protest movements. It links a critique of violently imposed fiscal “austerity” to militarized regimes of policing and surveillance at UC Davis and other UC campuses that extend well before November 18, 2011. Repositioning these student protests within a transnational and racial framework reveals that who is protesting is a key factor in the violent repression of certain bodies, as is the politics of certain movements.