Transcending enclosures by bus: Public transit protests, frame mobility, and the many facets of colonial occupation

Abstract

In this article, I investigate three public transit-centered Palestinian political actions in the West Bank and argue that the activists’ framing choices facilitate particular forms of global solidarity. The bus-centered political actions I examine are the Palestinian Freedom Rides of 2011, the Freedom Bus of 2014, and the bus sabotage of 2013. I demonstrate that the activists and participants in each of these cases dexterously move among a collection of terminological frames, invoking racial segregation, racism, and apartheid alongside occupation and colonialism. This rhetorical movement parallels the physical movement that the bus enables and represents. In turn, both forms of movement carry Palestinian political messages beyond the Israeli enclosures in order to connect with diverse solidarity audiences and educate them about Palestinian experiences of im/mobilization.

‘Not as single spies’: a review of European Social Anthropology 2020

“…Through diverse case studies based in Palestine and Kashmir, the issue examines the overlapping and intersecting logics of occupation and settler colonialism, interrogating whether and how the modalities of violence shift or are experienced differently by populations across multiple sites, analysing issues of legality, sovereignty, humanitarianism, gender, space and materiality. Griffin (2020) documents the way in which Palestinians have used protests centred on buses to reclaim mobilities in a context where settler buses have definitively shaped the racial dimensions of settler colonialism through a complex web of checkpoints and permit regimes. In a conscious symbolic co-opting of the strategies of the US Civil Rights movement, these 'Freedom Rides' provide a 'grammar' of resistance that resonates across global contexts.…”

Hidden in Plain Sight: “Neutral” Enclosures for High‐Skilled Immigrants During COVID‐191

“…We typically think about enclosures as tangible spaces, marked by boundaries or walls, such as migrant detention camps or internment camps of the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries. De Angelis (2019) describes enclosures in the Marxian sense as state‐based disciplinary mechanisms which are intended to contain, control and discipline people for capitalist political economies (see also Griffin 2020; Yeoh and Lam 2022). De Angelis (2019) not only emphasizes the exclusionary practices that “allow migrants to be constantly governed from a distance through interventions in their everyday lives and affective relations,” but he also notes that these control mechanisms enhanced migrants' precarity and vulnerability (De Angelis 2019:633).…”