WEDNESDAY 7 OCTOBER

Meet your Professional Services

10:00-11:00, Chrystal Macmillan Building

An informal meet up for students to get to know what Professional Services do and how the current situation is affecting us and how we support students and staff. 

The PICKET DISCO returns! Joyful militancy and antifascist macarena

10:00-11:00, Kings Buildings

The PICKET DISCO is touring! After a hugely successful PICKET DISCO in 50 George Square, we're bringing the fun and joy to Kings' buildings! After a brief antifascist chat on Simone Weil's joyful strikes and Michel Foucault's claim that "one does not have to be sad in order to be militant", we put theory into action and DANCE! To paraphrase Emma Goldman: if we can't dance to it, it's not our revolution! (Sequins, pink outfits and portable disco balls optional).

IMPACT: By the end of it, you'll have learned to dance the macarena, the time warp, the slosh and any other joyful collective dancing our members and students will bring!

Language Cafe

11:00-12:00, Chrystal Macmillan Building

Precarity for All: What University AI Contrasts Enable

11:00-12:00, Kings Building 

Right to the City: Understanding Urban Power and Resistance

11:00-12:00, Old College 

We will introduce the concept of Lefebvre’s Right to the City, discussing how the concept theorizes power and resistance as inherent aspects of urban living. We will connect this urban theory to the strike, institutional power, and the ways we can consider taking up space within the city of Edinburgh.

Erased & found again: Blackout Poetry for the Soft & Wild-hearted

11:30-12:30, St John’s Street Picket, Holyrood Campus

A blackout poetry workshop using materials from media coverage of the current dispute, university statements and related documents.

EUJPS Rally: Three Years of Complicity

13:00-15:00, Main Library 

Working groups assemble 

15:00-16:30, Pleasance Cabaret Bar, 60 Pleasance, EH8 9TJ

This week we bring together the 6 working groups of students and staff who have been doing MIND-BLOWING work behind the scenes. These are the collective architects of… 

The teach-out programme, the fundraisers, the community strike kitchen, the bake sale, the soul night, the radio take-over, the many artistic posters, signs, banners all over campus, the resources for students and staff on visa, the rally, and the many open letters addressed to Peter Mathieson which no doubt helped his decision to step down. 

This is for all involved or wanting to become involved in the student-staff assemblies’ working groups! Groups will share updates, plans and we will collectively decide how to focus and coordinate our actions and efforts. All welcome, even if you don’t have a group yet - come and get involved. 

We got Peter Mathieson to step down. But that’s only the first step towards a university that works for its students and staff, and a management that answers to us - not just to itself and to investors.

Students and staff ARE the university 

https://www.instagram.com/p/DeIKL-JuX_Q/?stkn=YzAyMDM1MGJkZA%3D%3D

THURSDAY 8 OCTOBER

Struggles for reproductive justice on and off campus

10:00-11:00, Chrystal Macmillan Building

Talking about broader reproductive justice struggles, and connecting to campus fights about precarity, workload (making time for care), social reproductive burdens that play out in university labour, perhaps also to disability and uni reproductive health issues. 

Queer Resistance and Collective Action: Lessons from Authoritarian Regimes

10:30-11:30, Lighthouse Bookshop, 43045 W Nicolson Street, EH8 9DB

How do people resist when resistance itself becomes dangerous? Drawing on research with LGBTQIA+ communities in Kazakhstan, Russia, and across Central Asia, this interactive session explores everyday acts of queer resistance, the building of solidarity under authoritarian conditions, and the creative ways communities challenge oppression. Together, we will reflect on what these experiences can teach us about resilience, collective action, and social change in the face of growing social and political inequalities.

18th century Moray House and Debates about Slavery

11:30-12:30, St John’s Street Picket, Holyrood campus

A walking tour of three buildings on the Moray House campus and their connections to slavery and colonialism

Jardineros film screening + Q&A

18:00-19:30, MF Coffee Shop, Summerhall, 1 Summerhall Pl, EH9 1PL

Jardineros is a film about landscape labour, tracking the often unrecognized work of labourers that build and maintain U.S. landscape architecture. The screening will be followed by an online Q&A with Michelle Franco, landscape architect and filmmaker.

Dunadh Poetry Night

19:00-20:30, Typewronger Books

FRIDAY 9 OCTOBER

Politics and Art - Lecture & Discussion

10:30-12:00, ECA Fire Station picket

Reading Marx Today

11:00-12:00, Chrystal Macmillan Building

Rage against the machine: on collective struggles against AI

11:30-12:30, Drummond Street

Reclaim our Homes, Reclaim our Cities! A workshop with Living Rent

13:00-15:00, Bennets Bar Backroom, 32 Valleyfield St, EH3 9LP, UK

Living Rent is Scotland’s tenants and community union. We are running a workshop on power and resistance in our housing system, and how we’ve leveraged the power of organised communities and collective direct action against politicians and landlords to demand homes and cities for people, not for profit.  

Come along with some lunch and a pen and paper to learn how we do this, and how you can too. We’ll be talking about the history of resistance here in the UK from women’s rent strikes in Glasgow in 1916, to resisting evictions and fighting for rent controls in Scotland in the 2020s. Then you’ll be doing the talking about your own housing issues and we’ll work out what to do about them together! 

No reading or prep necessary, but here are some great books and articles: 

Cities for People, Not for Profit (Edited by Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer) 

Abolish Rent (Tracey Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, 2024)

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities (Edited by Ananya Roy and Hilary Malson, 2019) 

Renters Unite: How Tenants Unions Are Fighting the Housing Crisis (Jacob Stringer, 2025)

FemSoc: ‘Trans culture from the trans-Atlantic’ - on trans cultural producers and reflections on the nature of activism

16:30-17:30, Southside Community Centre, 117 Nicolson St, Edinburgh EH8 9ER

Dr Gina Gwenffrewi is a researcher and tutor in English Literature, Queer and Trans studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Financialisation and higher education: economic laws or economic myths?

10:00-11:00, Chrystal Macmillan Building

University leaders like to talk about "markets in higher education" - but do we actually operate using market mechanisms? In this teach out, we will critically discuss some of the most common statements made about higher education finance and will shine a light on how decisions presented as "economic necessity" may actually be reflections of ideological beliefs rather than empirical analysis. The format will be interactive and invite perspectives from all disciplines - to highlight that understanding economic questions requires insight from many disciplines, including, but not only, Economics.

SATURDAY 10 OCTOBER

Student Bloc: Scottish National March for Palestine

13:00-15:00, The Mound