Were there student protests when Peter Robinson gave his inaugural lecture as honorary professor at Queen’s University’s Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice? If there were they were not widely reported. There was a letter signed by 37 staff members expressing “deep concern and profound regret” at Robinson’s appointment. While the full content of the letter does not appear to be in the public realm it refers to issues such as, views on homosexuality and Robinson’s initial support of a controversial Pastor’s comments about Islam.

Of course, you might say, ‘why bother protesting at all? Will it even achieve anything?’ I think it does. We live in an age where protest is becoming increasingly immaterial. By immaterial I don’t mean irrelevant, I mean digital – millions of soundbite slogans thrown every second into the eternal echo chamber of Twitter feeds and Facebook pages; there one second gone the next. While social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have been hugely important for the #MeToo campaign and arguably were a significant factor behind events such as the Arab spring, I would argue that these are rare occurrences and that we should not ignore the potent power of ongoing, organised material protest, i.e making ourselves materially present in the discourse. After all, Robinson’s lecture and Foster’s presence at it was a material event; a space of appearance as theorist Judith Butler would say – they were physically there, but where were we?

With this year being the 50th anniversary of the 1968 student and worker protests in France (and other various protests and uprisings around the world) I began to wonder – given the nature of some of Robinson’s views; and in addition the presence of DUP leader Arlene Foster at the event, why were there not significant, active and vocal protests; in particular from the students (notwithstanding, of course, that some students are supporters of the DUP). Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries students have played a significant role in active protest. 1968 was no different.

In 1968 the contrast in worlds was stark. The privileged few and the excluded many. A very different kind of homecoming was what France’s Algerian refugees had received. Returning aliens of a crumbling empire, excluded to margins of Paris, to live in makeshift shacks. All under the shadow of their neighbours; the modernist, ‘American style’ concrete faculty buildings of Nanterre university’s – geographically neighbours, economically worlds apart. Henri Lefebvre, who at the time was Professor of sociology at the university described the campus as “a ghetto of students and teachers situated in the midst of other ghettos filled with the ‘abandoned’.” Education was “subject to the compulsions of production, and driven into an extra-urban existence.”

Building C – indistinguishable amongst the repetitive concrete monoliths – became ground zero. It was here that Lefebvre, and others, to lectures halls filled with thousands of students, would deliver seminars on the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption – out of which his seminal text Everyday Life in the Modern World (1968) would emerge. Three years earlier he had written his controversial La Proclamation De La Commune (1965), a text that some believe was central to the events of May 68.

Lefebvre’s students would have been aware of the ideas formulated in that prescient text around the exclusion and alienation of the working classes to the margins of the city. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the student leaders of May 68 and one of Lefebvre’s students said that “his ideas on cultural revolution in everyday life, and on offering a different version of Marxism, influenced the Movement of [1968].”

The events of 68 in Paris were complex. To reduce them to single idea or issue would be highly reductionistic. There were, however, two major themes that permeated the discourse of the day: an outdated worldview of the ruling class particularly with regard to sex; sexuality and gender roles and secondly, the alienation that was being experienced, by the likes of the Algerian refugees, but also many other marginalised people across the city. The response, was radical protest. Buildings were occupied, barricades erected, the pavements dug up — a symbolic and utopian act, for beneath the streets as the protestors proclaimed was the beach.

Belfast 2018, is – to state the obvious – not Paris of 1968. The cultural ecosystem in which the uprisings began was very different. But I wonder why, in the face of many similar issues – outdated moral codes that many countries would see as against basic human rights; policies that do not help the marginalised and poor; support for student fees etc. – were the students quiet? Where was the noisy protest? The occupation of the lecture theatre? The disruption?

I would be interested to hear the views of any students…