Despite attacks on freedom of speech concerning Palestine at universities, students and staff are resisting and continuing to campaign for the rights of Palestinian people. Prevent has built an environment of silence and fear and although some students and staff may self-censor or limit their involvement, others refuse to shrink back. Students continue to speak out and put their education and bodies on the line as they occupy buildings, intervene in boardroom meetings and oppose former Israeli soldiers or regime representatives speaking on campus.

Behrouz Boochani’s novel No Friend But the Mountains (2018) and his collaborative film with Arash Sarvesanti, Chauka Please Tell Us the Time (2019) are vivid and poetic descriptions of Australia’s offshore immigration detention industry. Much more than descriptions of this murderous system, these works constitute artistic and philosophical resistance to the system—a system that Boochani calls Manus Prison Theory.

When play happens in cities it can enhance collective world building projects, shaping social imaginaries through its speculative, imaginative, generative qualities. Urban play situated within public space often appropriates and defamiliarises its codes and rules through the lens of a game world.