Counterinterpretation: affirmatives should defend a method of intellectual fugitivity, only that can open up fluid networks of knowledge to rethink the broken university.

In community, we slip away from fixed places and practices. Fugitive convivial praxis defies infrastructures of domination, the material systems that organise and reproduce everyday life. Fugitive convivial praxis centres fluid networks of knowledge, off the radar, that may be deemed illegible or even unintelligible to the outside. The construct of fugitivity within university undercommons can grow into forms of maroon communities or acts of marronage. Rather than being simply a flight from the plantation in a literal sense, marronage refers to flight from oppressive institutions through permanent institutional reconfiguration as well as to an existential or different state of being (Ortiz ). Historical maroon practices emerged from the fragmented places, experiments, and possibilities of our future world (Gilmore ). That is, marronage refuses enslavement to ‘quite literally … change places: to destroy the geography of slavery by mixing their labour with the external world to change the world and thereby themselves’ (Gilmore , 231).

Marronage as a practice of flight becomes a significant black method of producing place. Black geographers continue to expand the concept of marronage in countering the presumed aspatial nature of black place-making (McKittrick ; McKittick and Woods ). As Wright () notes, the conversion of difficult, unruly terrains deemed too undesirable and inaccessible for governance and capital accumulation made possible maroons’ alternative ‘social and political worlds’ (1142). In university undercommons, maroon scholar communities rework the geographic refuse, collectively ally in black scholarly space, and tap into openings for fugitive convivial praxis. Such maroon communities remain tenuous as both fugitivity and marronage are still limited frames for theorising freedom. That is, fugitivity and marronage as strategies for black freedom must be considered alongside conditions of unfreedom. For example, while we were able to nurture decolonial undercurrents amongst ourselves, there was a constant re-emerging above ground in other course encounters where we had to reckon with norms, codes, and rules of the university. According to Rinaldo Walcott, ‘flight is not freedom and neither is subterfuge’ so to rethink ‘fugitivity and marronage as freedom’s violence’ is to push the work of the radical imaginary in the long emancipation or ‘freedom yet to come’ (, 107). For us, learning inside the university demands constant questioning of the illusions of power and fomenting dissent along with the (re)actualisation of life-affirming collective relationships – with one another and with Mother Earth – to see both the possibilities and the limits of fugitive convivial praxis.