Specific Session VI: A Global Dissenting Youth? Student movements and youth activism in the anti-austerity and anti-corporate mobilisations: relevance, role, strategies and effects

Chair: Lorenzo Zamponi, European University Institute, lorenzo.zamponi@eui.eu
Co-Chair: Joseba Fernández González, Universidad del País Vasco, josebafergon@gmail.com
Discussant: Eduardo Romanos Fraile, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, eduardo.romanos@cps.ucm.es

When did the current cycle of global contention start? Can we consider it a single phenomenon or an articulated set of different and interrelated social facts? Which are the shared traits among episodes of collective action placed in different political contexts, cultural settings, social roots and goals? These and other questions are at the core of the contemporary debate on contentious politics, and we aim to contribute in addressing them focusing on a particular aspect that is common to most mobilisations of this cycle: the significant involvement of young people in collective action and in the politics of dissent. Our panel will focus on the student movement, as a social actor which has been active in different countries in the last years, and on youth activism, as a wide set of experiences and practises of contention which have played a relevant role in many different conflicts, contaminating and disseminating contents and forms of mobilisation. The wave of student mobilisation against the corporatisation of education and knowledge and the increasing precarity of work, in fact, is the immediate antecedent of the current wave of protests in Europe, and it might me argued that the contemporary anti-austerity movement discourse has been developing in that context. Furthermore, some scholars have already underlined the role of university campuses as a space for mobilisation and of student loans as a fundamental topic in the Occupy movement in the USA. But generational cleavages are visible also out of the education system, and youth activism has been considered relevant in all the indignados mobilisations, involving the so-called “generation of digital natives”. We invite empirical-oriented papers and interpretive analyses, aiming at building, through the lens of youth activism, a genealogy of the contemporary wave of mobilisation and to contribute to a better understanding of it.

Contacts

For any additional information on the conference, please make contact Nicole Doerr (Mount Holyoke College), Marianne van de Steeg (FU Berlin)nand/or Alice Mattoni (European University Institute): esasocialmovements@gmail.com
For specific questions on panels proposed as listed above please directly contact panel chairs. Note, however, that all papers ultimately have to be submitted to the ESA’s electronic abstract proposal system until February 1.