This qualitative case study explores how neoliberalism affects how food insecure student-parents experience higher education. Drawing on interviews with administrators, student activists, and student-parents at one U.S. research university, this article argues that neoliberalism's emphasis on revenue generation and a shift toward individualism has…

In this paper, we place the issue of university activism in the context of constituent and constituted power. By this we mean the ever-present danger that activists' demands will be co-opted and concurrently deactivated. To mitigate this risk, we develop a set of conceptual tools that enables thinking about the activist university in terms of…

In the 1960s, Black student protests of racism through sit-ins, building occupations, and demands for the resignation of university top administrators spurred the creation of ethnic studies and diversity programs on white university campuses in the United States. These efforts did not, unfortunately, dismantle entrenched structural racism. Black…

Student movements in Latin America have historically been at the forefront of democratization and progressive social action. This article seeks to understand state-led protest control against students and their movements in Argentina in the last decades (1997-2007). By drawing on a database of contentious politics events in Argentina using…

In this article, authors explore and synthesize principles of the Identity-Conscious Supervision model and the power-conscious framework to guide supervisors in their approach to supporting both staff activists and student activists on their campus.

This article employs critical race theory (CRT) to explore what student activist counter-narratives reveal about the logics of institutional diversity work and the ways this work reinforces racist configurations of power and exclusion in higher education. In 2014, student activism erupted in a series of critical incidents on university campuses…

This qualitative study explores the experiences and perspectives of disabled student activists involved in the creation of disability cultural centers (DCCs) on college and university campuses in the United States. The main purpose is to advance recognition of disability as a marginalized student identity on college campuses in need of safe spaces…

This article is an ethnography of a student protest against a Finnish university's plans to give up 25 percent of its campus buildings until 2030. The Finnish universities faced financial deficits primarily due to education cuts implemented by Finland's right-wing government between 2015 and 2019. To balance the budget, Tampere University proposed…

How does the academic discourse of resistance in university classrooms write the identities of resisting students into shape? We answer this question by performing a review of the student resistance literature. Analyzing this literature, we apply methods of critical discourse analysis and identify six identity positions of the resisting student as…

Drawing on a Foucauldian theorisation and an in-depth study with eight disabled student activists in England, this paper explores how persistent marginalisation and ableism in higher education has triggered a wave of activism among disabled students, who, just before the advent of the pandemic, had organised a structured movement, Disabled…

The belief that we are living in a post-truth age raises a number of complex, paradoxical questions. Does it suggest, for example, that truth no longer matters? Or, that the idea of truth no longer exists? The university, of course, has long been associated with the interests of truth -- not only in searching for truth, but in telling the truth.…

Since the inception of the "Woman, Life, Freedom" revolution in September 2022, following the tragic death of Mahsa Amini, universities in Iran have been at the forefront of resistance. In response, the government has attempted to silence opposition by exerting control over universities and engaging in waves of arrests and imprisonments.…

In this paper, I unpack how youth organizers became politicized activists through their engagement in the prefigurative practices of the fair trade movement. Prefiguration refers to the practices of a movement that are embedded in and reproduce their shared political visions; prefigurative politics allows social movement groups to embody their…

Pivoting around two sit-ins at the University of Georgia, this article examines student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the US South. The first sit-in, at the conclusion of the spring 1968 March for Coed Equality, was part of the effort to overcome parietal rules that significantly restricted women's rights but left men relatively…

This study combines critical service learning (Mitchell, 2008) and antioppressive pedagogies (Kumashiro, 2002) to highlight the importance of using community sites aimed toward transformational social change. How sites are structured and how students are positioned influence what students learn from the experience. Using ethnographic methods, I…