Translocal assemblage: student activism and social movement learning in Pakistan

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers a spatial understanding of learning in social action by analysing the case of Progressive Students Collective (PSC), a Leftist student organisation based in Lahore, Pakistan. Under the umbrella of PSC, there is a growing progressive social movement among students in higher education who engage in alternative forms of learning and knowledge-building, thereby nurturing local identities, enabling new social relationships, and creating possibilities for different forms of resistance. Despite a four-decade-long official ban on student unions, students in Pakistan continue to articulate campus-based and global issues through staged demonstrations and social media strategies that expose unjust social issues prevalent at the institutional, local, and national levels. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted between 2021 and 2023 in Lahore, Pakistan, to understand the spatiality of multidirectional crossings and dimensions of student activism. By applying a translocal assemblage analytic, the paper illustrates how activists acquire and disseminate knowledge across boundaries of time and space. Findings suggest that migration, mobility and knowledge exchange in physical and virtual spaces, shape translocal materialities for student activists. It fosters interconnectedness across various localities on both material and symbolic levels.