The Tunisian university at the intersection of global-local conjunctures: knowledge, power and the struggle for liberation

Abstract

This article adopts a longue durée approach to examining resistance around the Tunisian university, tracing current material and epistemological struggles back to the colonial era. To do so, it fuses theoretical insights from the growing bodies of literature concerned with how colonial-capitalist power is manifested and contested within and on the margins of institutions of higher education, including Marxist, social movement theory, and decolonial traditions. The article considers four important conjunctures in the development of the Tunisian academy as an institution where the connections between knowledge generation and (neo)colonial-capitalist power have been articulated and contested. The article will conclude by arguing that the sediments of resistance remaining from all four transformative moments have dialectically contributed to building alternative knowledge projects within and beyond the university. Whereas dominant modes of knowledge production enable and normalise the destructive and grossly unequal patterns of extraction and accumulation associated with (neo)colonial-capitalism, alternative knowledge projects instead seek to transform Tunisians’ relations with one another, with the state and with the land in ways that promote the forging of the collective and meaningful liberation.