When Students Protest

Universities in the Global North

Judith Bessant, Analicia Mejia Mesinas, Sarah Pickard

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2021
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786611819
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Student political action has been a major and recurring feature of politics across the globe throughout the past century. Students have been involved in a full range of public issues, from anti-colonial movements, anti-war campaigns, civil rights and pro-democracy movements to campaigns against neoliberal policies, austerity, racism, misogyny and calls for climate change action. Yet their actions are frequently dismissed by political elites and others as 'adolescent mischief' or manipulation of young people by duplicitous adults. This occurs even as many working in governments, traditional media and educational organisations attempt to suppress student movements. Moreover, much of mainstream scholarly work has deemed student politics as unworthy of intellectual attention. These three edited volumes of books help set the record straight.
Written by scholars and activists from around the world, When Students Protest: Universities in the Global North is the third in this three-volume study that explores university student politics in the global north. Authors explore university and college student political action, especially over the past decade. It is just over fifty years since May 1968 when student protests erupted at Université Paris Nanterre in France and then spread across the globe. Contributors to this book demonstrate that despite repeated attempts by states, power elites and institutions to suppress and even criminalise student political action, student movements have always been part of the political landscape and remain a significant and potent source of political change and renewal.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Politics, Participation, and University Students’ Action: Introductory Essay
• 2 Activation of Student Protest: Reaction, Repression, and Memory at Nanterre University, Paris 1968–2018
• 3 “Different Struggles, the Same Fight”?: A Comparative Analysis of Student Movements in Chile (2011), Quebec (2012), and Hong Kong (2014)
• 4 “We Are the University!” Campus Protest in the Context of Counter-Globalization Critique: The Amsterdam University Protests, 2015–2016
• 5 Fault Lines and Heterogeneity: Quebec’s Student Movement during the Maple Spring of 2012
• 6 Organizing Campus Alliances to Resist a Neoliberal Attack on Workers Conditions in Toronto, Canada
• 7 Student Protests against Neoliberal Education Policies in Italy: Three Student Organizations
• 8 The Russian Student Protests of March 2017: Harsh Responses of the University Officials and the Authorities on the Demands for Social Change
• 9 “Demanding What is Not Theirs to Demand”: Rebellious Students in Post-Socialist Montenegro
• 10 When Students Protest and When They Don’t: Challenging the Apathy Narrative in Australia
• 11 Student Mobilizations and Local Public Action: A French Case Study
• 12 From Squatting to Antimilitarism in Sardinia: A Student’s Relational Agency Case-Study
• 13 Protest Practices: A Case Study of Students’ Collective Action in Italy
• 14 Student Activism in Bologna: Old Fractures, Emerging Alliances, and the Use of Depoliticization as a Repressive Strategy
• 15 Global Climate Strike Protesters and Media Coverage of the Protests in Truro and Manchester
• 16 A Social Imaginary for Collective Becoming: Occupy and the Nature of “Real Participation”
• Index
• About the Contributors