Students Blockade – Another World Is Possible?

Students have been protesting across Serbia for months, demanding criminal and political responsibility for the deaths of 15 people in the collapse of an awning at Novi Sad's Railway Station. Their persistence in a fight for a more just society and change of the system (not only the regime) reached its peak on 15th March with a mass protest in Belgrade which gathered several hundred thousand citizens. Support to the students's blockade was expressed by influential French philosophers Alain Badious and Jacques Ranciere, as well as Madonna, while the western media ignore and diminish the impact of "the greatest student-led protest  since May 1968". What can we learn from Serbian students and their spontaneous collective creativity, self-organisation and media articulation? Why was it them who started the rebellion? How will the contradiction between the immense energy generated by the protest and a lack of political opposition be resolved?

The talk will include Aleksandar Reljić, the director of The Loudest Silence, the first cinematic document of the student protest in Serbia and the film's protagonists, as well as students in blockade, joined by blockading students from Zagreb's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and members of the initiative Students for Palestine.