Social networks and student activism: on the politicising effect of campus connections (original) (raw)
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Contemporary Social Science, 2013
Why might people sympathetic to the goals of a protest campaign choose not to participate? What distinguishes them sociologically from those who do participate? This paper uses the 2010/11 UK student protests as a case study for understanding how contemporary social movements mobilise individuals for high-cost/risk forms of activism participation. The protests saw large-scale regional and national demonstrations take place, along with the formation of a network of simultaneous campus occupations across the UK, presenting a greater scale and diversity of protest participation opportunities than had been seen for a generation. Nevertheless, students' political background and network access remained significant not only for shaping attitudes towards the efficacy and meaningfulness of protest, but also making protest participation appear an ‘available’ option. This paper uses interviews with participating and non-participating students from four UK universities to explore the range of pathways to mobilisation for national demonstrations and campus occupations.
Campus politics, student societies and social media
The university campus has often been seen as an important site for the politicization of young people. Recent explanations for this have focused attention upon the role of the student union as a means to enable a 'critical mass' of previously isolated individuals to produce social networks of common interest. What is missing from these accounts, however, and what this article seeks to address, is how these factors actually facilitate the development of political norms and the active engagement of many students. Drawing upon qualitative data from three countries we argue that it is the milieu of the smaller student societies that are crucial for facilitating the habitus of the student citizen. They provide the space for creative development and performance of the political self, affiliations to particular fields and access to cultural and social capital. Moreover, we contend that these processes of politicization are increasingly enacted through social media networks that foreground their importance for developing political habitus in the future. The university campus has long been regarded as an important space for enabling the engagement of students with politics and their participation in civil society more widely. For aspiring career politicians it represents the first significant rung on the ladder for professional recognition and future advancement. At least since the 1960s student politics has also been regarded as a crucible for student protest and social movement activism worldwide. The university campus also provides an important space for non-politicos to be exposed to political ideas and debates and a range of opportunities to engage in civic activities more broadly. Little surprise, then, that scholars have consequently been interested to explain the role played by universities in the formative development of the political norms and citizenship practices of their students.An insightful contribution to this debate by Nick Crossley and Joseph Ibrahim (2012) argues that the bounded environment of the university provides the ideal location for a 'critical mass' of previously isolated individuals
Campus Networks and Agitations
The University as a Site of Resistance, 2018
With ethnographic data, this chapter demonstrates the everyday life of a movement activist. It highlights how different spaces of the university contribute in changing students’ way of thinking and discusses how a student is inducted, trained, and made part of the movement bandwagon. The university has been evolving over the past five decades of struggle of inside and outside the campus through its students’ activism. This chapter focuses on the inside mechanism of this activism and demonstrates what motives a student to choose the path of activism and how their networks are rooted around Telangana cultural ethos.
Current Sociology, 2019
The relationship between students and activism has long interested sociologists, especially since the wave of social unrest of 1968 (Barker, 2008). However, the works that have looked at the topic can hardly be identified as a coherent, clearly identifiable strand of the literature. Furthermore, scholarly attention has fluctuated over time, with researchers reacting to the course of events and especially to the waves of student protests. Attention waned after the 1970s as governments proposed higher education reforms that succeeded in pacifying campuses, especially in Europe and the US (Daalder and Shils, 1982); and has risen again over the last decade or so as students seem to have made a comeback (Altbach and Klemencic, 2014). I suggest that the relevance of student protests for sociological thinking can be summarized around three main issues: (a) the potential political role of students in national politics; (b) the role of the university, and more broadly of educational institutions, in the economy and society; and (c) the political socialization of young people and its consequences. Furthermore, these issues overlap to a certain degree with the three main approaches adopted by scholars of student protests: social movements, sociology of education, and sociology of generations/youth. These issues and approaches are not mutually exclusive, but should rather be seen as sets that overlap with each other, creating subsets.
Students, their Protests, and their Organizations. Exploring Old Gaps and New Evidence
10.1285/i20356609v12i1p1, 2019
While introducing the four contributions to the special issue "Students, their protests, and their organizations: exploring old gaps and new evidence", we link them with influential literature on students' protests and their organizations. The 'old gaps' refer to the long-standing divide between two traditions of research in students' collective action: social movements and organizational studies. The 'new evidence' refers to the finding that studentship is not conducive to protests (Oana 2019a), while the father's education is a strong predictor. While the 'agentic' character of studentship is one important presumption behind many arguments making sense of campus unrest, this finding does not invalidate it as such, but rather indicates that selection to higher education, and not campus socialization, may be conducive to this form of political participation.
Social Movement Studies: The contentious politics of higher education
Social Movement Studies, 2020
During the last decade, opposition to fees, debt and managerial policies seem to be a shared dynamic in higher education protests around the world. The recent waves of university protests in the UK (2010/2018), Italy (2008/2010), Chile (2011/2012), Quebec (2012) and South Africa (2015) share common targets and tactics, but they had different resolutions. From a new generation of free education policies to dramatic political betrayals, explaining the impacts of higher education protests remains a challenge. In the book The Contentious Politics of Higher Education, Lorenzo Cini addresses this question by exploring the relation- ships between university governance – the structure of universities as institutions – and the often new tactics of contention. Over seven chapters, the author argues that the structure of universities’ governance is one of the main determinants shaping the strategic agency and outcomes of protestors. Based on qualitative techniques, the research compares how different governance approaches shaped repertoire of activists and their impacts during the university protests of Italy (2010/2018) and England (2010/2014). The results suggest that institutions governed by a professional cadre of academic managers, like English universities, tend to stimulate more confrontational but low- impact tactics of mobilization. By contrast, academic regimes of governance predominant in Italian institutions, tend to incentive more diverse and successful repertoires of action. To explain these results, the author theorizes the impact of university governance over the contentious activity of students, academics and staff. The explanation suggests that universities with academic governance tends to establish ongoing communication and dialogue with activists and other potential challengers. This approach encourages activists to develop a mixture of confrontational and non-confrontational tactics, which increase their influence and power on universities, and it maximizes their impacts. On the contrary, managerial governance tends to ignore and repress challengers, neutralizing their power of influence and association and therefore diminishing the possibilities of success. To confront neutralization, challengers may opt for radical and confrontational tactics, like occupations or disruptions, to recover power on campuses. In doing so, activists mobilize repertoires of action that involve significant compromise and risk for campaigners, and therefore are hard to spread among their constituency. The capacity of challengers to resolve the tension between increasing their influence without losing support thus also shapes the resolution of the conflict and the outcomes of protests.
Student politics: between representation and activism
Handbook on the Politics of Higher Education
This chapter reviews and offers directions for future research on student politics in higher education in different parts of the world. The concept of student politics refers to the activities related to the power relations between students and other social actors in and out the higher education systems; more specifically, it pertains to the relationships between students and university authorities, as well as the interactions between students and state officials. In analyzing the various forms of student politics, we draw the distinction between representation and activism, as two distinct yet interrelated activities. The first pertains to students organizing into representative student associations, such as student governments, graduate student employee unions, party-affiliated student organizations, or other student interest groups. Activism, on the other hand, denotes practices of student collective action through various forms of political engagement, whereby students act in support of or in opposition to a specific cause and/or hold the authority accountable. The analysis is guided by questions on how the various forms of student politics emerge and how they develop their organizational characteristics and their respective strategic repertoires.
Introduction: "The purpose of this research is to examine how college education changes a student’s political views. Research on college students’ political views has mainly dealt on young adults’ apathy towards politics (Manning 2014), characteristics of young college student (Niemi, Ross, & Alexander 1978) and politicization of college students in the college and university setting (Loader et al. 2015). Oftentimes, this previous research focuses on the bigger picture. This research paper focuses on students’ participation in politics at San Diego State University, their political views being influenced at SDSU, and many of their political views leaning to the left. Social movements specifically target college students as recruitments because they are more susceptible to accepting new ideas and following a political movement. College is a place where an individual experiences transition points, where their daily routines and social networks are disrupted, or they experience some degree of moral shock. In this setting, an individual can socialize with people from different places and backgrounds, as well as partake in social gatherings (Munson). In this study, we will investigate how participation in a political organization on campus has in any way changed or influenced a student’s personal political view from when they first started college to where they are now."
Student activism: Impacting personal, institutional, and community change
New Directions for Student Services, 1994
With observed and predicted growth in social and political activism among students, higher education and community leaders are challenged to rethink the impact of student activism on students' development and on institutional and community change processes.
International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, 2019
Student activists have played notable roles in national social and political movements. Deploying a variety of analytic approaches, extensive research has been conducted regarding student movements in terms of their causes, their operational characteristics, and their relationships with broader intra- and inter-societal social and political forces. Yet the literature concerning the impact of student movements is unclear regarding the organisational and institutional environment determinants of their emergence and durability. Little attention has been directed at considering student activism through the prisms of social movement theory, institutional theory and organisational study. The current study seeks to address this situation through a consideration of student movements in Thailand. It builds upon the recent work of Kanokrat (2016) in her application of social movement theory to student activism in Thailand to consider the implications of what Clemens and Cook (1999) refer to as the “social cage” of institutional interests. This synthesised analytic approach is applied in an assessment of the contemporary Dao Din student movement of Northeast Thailand, arguably Thailand’s highest profile student movement since the 2014 military coup.