Student protests

This study is developing theoretical, practical and critical standpoints related to populist political communication through the most important theories of the populism and authors that rises these questions. Starting through the concept definition of populism (Canovan, Laclau) the study discuss how is populism, politics and ideology interwoven (MacRae, Kramer, Kriesi), what about the populism and faces of democracy today (Canovan) when the focus is on populism as the ideology of democracy or non/ideology and taking the politics to the people in a case of connections between the populism as the ideology of democracy and its challenge (Mudde, Stanley); what are the new forms of populism today in relation to neo-liberalism in Central and Eastern Europe and liberal democracy (Decker, Laclau) since the populism is not the strong constellation but it is a serial of discursive practices which are moving system of structuring singnifiers that carries different historical and political paradigms (Laclau) (for example populism as a political style of communication). Taking the reactualization of some of the representative politics and theories of populism (Taggart, Moffitt and Tormey) I was using standpoints of research that populism is not the autodefinition but it is a very related to the political 'enemies' and it always depended of the condition of the contex (State) (related to political and material condition, esp. in South East Case countries. With focused analysis on media populism of changing processes of high education law and idea for external testing of the students/ academia people in Macedonia, this study considers theoretical contextualization of populism theory during the mass protests that has been happened in Macedonia (December 2014) where students and professors were leaking out at the streets with recognition and faced against the manipulation by the discourses of power.

Universities in post-apartheid South Africa have, for many years, grappled with student protests, especially as these related to rising university fees. However, many of these protests took place in historically black universities and were thus relegated to the margins, with little to no substantial intervention for marginalised students, most of whom were black African students. This changed with the advent of the #RhodesMustFall movement and the subsequent #FeesMustFall movement in 2015, where, for the first time, student protests took place in historically white universities and subsequently spread to universities throughout South Africa.

As these protests gripped the nation, it became evident that the issues raised within these protests went beyond just rising university fees. This dissertation aimed to delve deeper into the issues raised within the #FeesMustFall movement, by analysing both students leaders’ and academic managements’ media opinion pieces. It aimed to identify and explore the discursive formations related to race and class that structured students leaders’ and academic managements’ media opinions on the #FeesMustFall movement, as well as the effects these discursive formations had on their subjectivity.

This study adopted a qualitative research paradigm, with social constructionism and Michel Foucault’s approach to power, knowledge and subjectivity serving as the theoretical frameworks of this study. Data was collected from online newspaper databases and media sites, which yielded all available opinion pieces from both student leaders and academic management. From this, three media opinion pieces from academic management and four media opinion pieces from student leaders were selected using a random number generator. The data was then analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis. The following prominent discourses were identified and discussed in relation to the research questions and broader objectives of the current study: Educational equality/inequality for poor black South African students; universities and university management as antithetical to poor black African students; and #FeesMustFall student protestors as problematic.

The student leader opinion pieces drew on broader discourses of democracy, equality/inequality and racism to legitimatise their call for free education for poor black African students. These discourses refer to the promises made in the Constitution of South Africa and are necessary to correct the disparities and material realities that exist for poor black Africans. On the other hand, the academic management opinion pieces drew on discourses such as individualism and student protestors as violent and threatening, which served to obscure the very conditions that the student leader opinions highlighted. This research thus elucidated and deconstructed the types of discourses used by academic management in this study and showed how such discourses work to marginalise student protestors. In doing so, it paves the way for such discourses to be subverted, as they have no place in post-apartheid South Africa.

This thesis describes the context of the democratization of the faculty of Architecture in the year 1969. In the period after the Second World War there was no consensus on how to solve the housing crisis in the Netherlands. On the one hand the traditionalists tried to use the values and standards of the time before the war, on the other hand the modernists tried to use their abstract ideals to solve the problems. In the sixties both the modernists and the traditionalists are in a crisis with themselves and the growing population of architecture students in Delft and Eindhoven are beginning to criticize the way they are taught. The education of the faculty was too much based on the old-fashioned vision of the architect as a craftsman. Change was needed, so the students, with the leadership of study association Stylos, stood up for themselves and declared the democratization of the faculty. Unfortunately the democratization was a chaos and only caused the creation of an archipelago of different departments, with each their own way of broadening their academic scope. The growing criticism was not only present at the architecture schools but also in the architectural and urbanism practise. The users wanted more and more to have a say in the process of the building of large housing projects. They demanded diversity and quality. The democratization at the faculty and the changes in architecture from a technocratic one to the introspective one of the seventies, were tendencies that evolved parallel to each other.

This essay analyzes the development of the relationship between performance and digital media within protest movements in the Americas. I track digital media's role in constituting what I call “performance constellations.” Performance constellations complicate previous definitions of performance as acts of transfer in order to account for hybrid, networked, and decentered protest performances. Focusing on 1990s hacktivism within the Zapatista rebellion and on social media practices during the 2011 Chilean student protests, I demonstrate that by dis-locating bodies and events, performance constellations constitute important reworkings of time and space outside of neoliberal management.

The "postcard amendment" proposed by the Brandt administration in 1977 intended to replace the quasi-judicial check that conscientious objectors had to undergo up to then by a simple declaration. A reform of the fundamental right to refuse military service, which had been introduced in 1949, had become necessary due to the social change that had been in the offing since the 1960s and that had been considerably intensified by the 1968 student protests, leading to a strong increase in the number of conscientious objectors. Yet, the reform plan was highly debated. The argument went to the roots of the West German constitution and had to be decided by President Walter Scheel. He judged it in favor of the conservative opposition in Parliament and refused to sign the bill. The definite end of the reform came in April 1978 when the Supreme Court declared the project unconstitutional in a very controversial court judgment. The fact that the reform failed because of such considerable conservative forces contradicts the idea of a “fundamental liberalization”  of post-war West German society as proposed by scholars such as Ulrich Herbert.

Susan Booysen, author and editor, of Fees must fall sets out to answer the key questions: what did the student revolt of late 2015 to mid-2016 mean for governance in South Africa? How did it affect higher education and national government? Booysen states clearly that the answers to these questions “depend on the lenses worn and the directed angle” but she argues in conclusion that “from whichever angle it is approached …. it is evident that governance in South Africa and its higher education institutions has been irrevocably altered” (p 310). The challenge which this review takes up is to cross-examine this conclusion not from hindsight but by drawing on various viewpoints within the book.

The present chapter tackles the issue of the strategic decision over the political identity that the Italian student movement has faced in the recent cycle of struggles against two neoliberal reforms in the field of higher education in 2008 and 2010. Although this protest cycle lasted several years (from 2008 to 2012), it had two protest peaks (or, more
specifically, two distinct protest campaigns) concurrently with the implementation of Law 133 in 2008 (cuts in public higher education) and Law 240 in 2010 (managerial restructuring ...

This paper revisits the student protests that erupted in 2015 in South Africa and examines them through a political economy lens. It argues that the protests are symptomatic of bigger and deep-seated structural impediments to societal progress. It further notes that the former are vestiges of colonialism and apartheid because the South African society has not been transformed as it should have been as the social and economic patterns of exclusion still persist 24 years into the country's democracy. Using Thabo Mbeki's Two Nations Thesis, the paper drives its point home by calling for the deconstruction of the post-apartheid society and its total transformation through social development interventions and instruments such as social policy.

This article focuses on the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU), Iraq’s largest and most powerful independent workers’ union. Leaving aside IFOU’s resistance of foreign occupation and its fight against privatisation, this article focuses on the tensions between IFOU and the Maliki government and examines the extent to which IFOU has served as a bulwark against the state’s rising authoritarianism. The chapter begins with a brief history of Iraqi trade unions under the Baathist regime and concludes by arguing that examples of civil society movements such as IFOU are perhaps Iraq’s only real hope for genuine democratisation.

At the turn of the millennium, multiple countries erupted in student protests against tuition hikes in public universities. Despite arising in varying political contexts, these protests followed remarkably similar paths to achieving concessions.  In this chapter, I compare student protests against tuition hikes across three different welfare state types: Germany, Turkey, and the United States. I argue that the crucial commonality across these cases was the formation of unexpected alliances made possible by the failures of past movements. I offer a meso-level analysis of past “failures” that empowered strategic intentions through activists’ collective memory work. These positions offered new possibilities for brokerage, enabled and constrained different alliance configurations, especially with labor unions and civil society organizations. The legacy of the 1960s and the 1990s influenced the pathways available to the student activists in the 2000s.

There has been significant progress regarding the law on public demonstrations since the enactment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, the freedom of peaceful assembly, one of the four fundamental freedoms protected by section 2 of the Charter, is the least judicially explored freedom. Rather than undertake a free-standing freedom of peaceful assembly analysis, Canadian courts tend to subsume the analysis into freedom of expression. As illustrated by the increasingly frequent occurrence of demonstrations today, freedom of peaceful assembly is an emerging and ongoing issue in constitutional law. Accordingly, it is more crucial than ever that peaceful assembly law be developed and utilized in a manner consonant with the increasing frequency of demonstrations in today’s society.

In this paper, the author undertakes a critique of the freedom of peaceful assembly analysis as currently applied by the courts and presents a doctrinal analysis aiming to establish potential features of a stand-alone freedom of peaceful assembly Charter analysis. In particular, the author addresses how Canadian courts should approach peaceful assembly as an independent freedom, in light of the judicial treatment of other freedoms in current jurisprudence.

Notes for Panel 16: Great Refusals: Refusing One Dimensionality Today

The Dialectics of Liberation in an Age of Neoliberal Capitalism
International Herbert Marcuse Society

Seventh Biennial Conference, 26-28 October 2017, York University

https://marcuseconference.wordpress.com/

This paper draws attention to the intellectual life of the #FeesMustFall movement, highlighting how it became a student platform for critical informal education. Freire's concept of conscientisation is utilised to frame the social movement as a learning space of dialogue, critical thinking, knowledge exchange, and formulation of practical political action against higher education injustices. The Nelson Mandela University in South Africa is the site under study where informal education, conscientisation, and active learning occurred in its #FeesMustFall uprisings. Although the #FeesMustFall movement broadly took on a national temperament, each university campus had its own local unique experiences of the agitation. For Nelson Mandela University's microenvironment, the movement took on strong student-worker alliance organising principles and solidarities that yielded promising and continuing material transformations within a short period of time for its low-income university workers and black students. As one of the student leaders of this social movement, I provide here a personal activist experience from that period and space, emphasising the debates, knowledges, learning experiences, and theorising efforts that went with the protests that the #FeesMustFall student-worker alliance movement organised. This study contributes to the decolonisation of university learning spaces by centring alternative "classrooms" provided on the university margins by student social movements as pioneering platforms in the sociopolitical rollout of critical intellectual development and decolonisation of higher education.

The 2015/2016 academic year was an academic year that saw South African university students and leaders and the state engage in intense negotiations over free quality education. A considerable number of students joined this movement and were involved in or witnessed violence without realising how violence can harm them. This paper uses the interpretative phenomenological approach to interrogate the coping strategies employed by six students (who were part of the #FMF movement), in response to the violence that they witnessed at their campus. The findings reveal that witnessing violence is stressful. At some point, these students felt powerless and employed maladaptive coping strategies to deal with the threat of violence that they faced. The study recommends that university programmes be augmented to help students adopt a combination of the problem-focussed and anticipatory-focussed coping strategies to foster adaptive styles when coping with violence.

This introduction applies a conjunctural approach (Clarke 2017; Hall 1978) to contextualizing this section’s particular analyses and theorizations of the French Nuit Debout social movement that began in 2016 (and may or may not have ended that same year). Integrating popular press, alternative media, and scholarly treatments of Nuit Debout, it assembles a longer French historical view of forces, repertoires, and aspirations as well as a broader culturally specific (though sometimes cross-culturally shared) set of developments that inevitably converged to create the conditions for Nuit Debout’s emergence. With regard to one enduring part of the past, Nuit Debout demonstrates a palpably French critique and counter-production of everyday life, based in a desire to unleash human creativity while practicing an alternative direct democracy and forms of social relationship that exceed the value grids of consumer capitalism—prefigurative political features shared with other recent especially leaderless anti-austerity movements. The introduction then particularly emphasizes the innovative role of media and communication in Nuit Debout, before situating each contributing article in this larger set of cultural-historical relationships.

The 2015/2016 academic year was an academic year that saw South African university students and leaders and the state engage in intense negotiations over free quality education. A considerable number of students joined this movement and were involved in or witnessed violence without realising how violence can harm them. This paper uses the interpretative phenomenological approach to interrogate the coping strategies employed by six students (who were part of the #FMF movement), in response to the violence that they witnessed at their campus. The findings reveal that witnessing violence is stressful. At some point, these students felt powerless and employed maladaptive coping strategies to deal with the threat of violence that they faced. The study recommends that university programmes be augmented to help students adopt a combination of the problem-focussed and anticipatory-focussed coping strategies to foster adaptive styles when coping with violence.

This article is meant to suggest the idea that an understanding of student protests inthe country during the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century cannot ignore leftist political currents that permeated the university students in that period. Without reaching the desirable degree of completeness, it is intended to demonstrate the link between the student mobilization occurred in 1971 and the ideological scaffolding that different youth groups wielded in defense of their struggles.

Abstract This article examines the North Korean city of Sinŭiju during the era of Soviet occupation, focusing specifically on the Sinŭiju incident of 23 November 1945. A violent clash between local youth and Communist security forces, the incident revealed the combustible mixture of factors present in postcolonial North Korea. The Soviet military government's deadly response to the protests seriously threatened Korea's receptiveness to the Korean Communist Party and to the Soviet Union, and forced stronger control over ...

Review essay of Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism eds. Holloway, J. Matamoros, F. & Tischler, S. (2009) (London: Pluto Press) in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture Vol. 8, Issue 2 http://logosjournal.com/2011/garland/