Governing the commute: infrastructural friction, im/mobility, and the psychopolitics of Palestinian higher education

This study examines how the regulation of movement under Israeli occupation shapes the everyday experiences of Palestinian university students. Drawing on narrative accounts from students at An-Najah National University, the study approaches commuting not as a routine act of transportation but as a politically regulated experience structured by checkpoints, delays, surveillance, and road closures. The analysis explores how restricted mobility affects students’ sense of time, bodily experience, communication, and academic participation. It shows how prolonged waiting, repeated inspection, and uncertainty extend beyond the checkpoint into the classroom and everyday social relations. At the same time, students frame education as a practice of defiance, through which they assert presence and continuity despite recurring restrictions on movement. By centering students’ commuting narratives, the study contributes to mobilities scholarship on settler-colonial space and unequal movement, demonstrating how everyday transit becomes a site where control, interruption, and resistance are experienced and negotiated.