Page - 12 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

12 siting futurity litical spaces I have encountered, spaces which provide answers to the urgent issues of unthinking sovereignty and practicing collectivity in the face of increasingly ingrained neoliberal in- transigence.2 The 2018 CUPE strike was a marked departure from previous York strikes in the Employer’s intransigence and usurping of the power of Senate, the body where academic governance is man- dated to happen by the York Act. Senate Executive mandated that the university remain open during the strike, a decision that created all manner of havoc and that was condemned in a series of hortative motions on the part of many of the university’s aca- demic units. The blatant insistence on running a “business-as- usual” regime, which involved an authoritarian takeover of the purportedly “public” news spaces of university representation, such as York’s campus newsletter, the Y-File, and the screens located all over campus, had created an atmosphere in which undergraduate students had felt it necessary to take some kind of action to voice their protest. After a shockingly violent Sen- ate meeting in March 2018, when a student senator was brutally barred from entering the Chamber by private security hired by the administration, a group of students decided not to leave until a list of demands had been met. They established an im- pressive social media presence and quickly shifted from calling themselves an “occupation” to a “reclamation” as those among them with affiliations with First Nations felt uncomfortable sid- ing with occupiers, while reclaiming land in the aftermath of the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline resonated more with them. On August 9, 2018, the day after CUPE 3903 formally dropped their unfair labor practice suit against York and less than three weeks after the union had been ordered back to work by the newly elected conservative government of Doug Ford, five union members (all PhD students) and three undergraduate members of RECLAIM YorkU, all of whom had been highly vis- 2 Matt Hern offers a good summary of these issues in Chapter 4, “The Kind- ness of Neighbors” of What a City Is For (Hern 2016).