The Disruptive Power of Student Faculty Collaborations

• In Event: Activating Disruptive Power: Transformative Possibilities for Eco-Justice in Postsecondary Education

Abstract

Students sit-in in the lobby of the academic services building demanding that the University President come out with a statement encouraging the university foundation members to divest from fossil fuels. The building is home to the admissions office and is where all campus tours begin. The students have strategically chosen to sit, chant, sing, and protest the university’s investments in fossil fuels right in the path of these campus tours in order to disrupt business as usual, using their disruptive power to move the university closer to environmental justice.

This paper discusses university students’ attempts to use disruptive power to shift policy, practices, and the structure of university administration and programs in order to collectively respond to continued assaults on the environment and the erasure of people. Specifically, I use Frances Fox Piven’s theoretical articulation of disruptive power to analyze the efforts of the Student Action Coalition (SAC) at the university. The SAC was composed of diverse student groups organizing around a broad range of social and ecological issues. Piven (2006) defines disruptive power as “the withdrawal of contributions to social cooperation by people at the lower end of hierarchical social relations” (2006, p. 20). The coalition attempted to use disruptive power through a variety of tactics to influence university administrators. An important element of the SAC’s development was collaboration with university faculty. As part of this paper, I discuss the impact and importance of faculty and student collaborations as part of disruptive strategies employed by students in the university context.

I also discuss what sort of interdependent relationships exist on university campuses that are ripe for the use of disruptive power. I use the experiences of student activists organizing for eco-justice on the University’s campus to explore locations of interdependence between the university and the student body and the possibilities for actualizing disruptive power in a university context. This preliminary case study steps into the previously unexplored affective terrains of Frances Fox Piven’s theorization of disruptive power, where interdependencies may be less material but are no less valuable or powerful (e.g. student impact on campus climate, image of the university, campus service labor, etc.).

As environmental educators hoping to collectively respond to environmental injustice, the theory of disruptive power and the experiences of student activists can inform approaches to collaborative environmental justice work. While course content and pedagogical approaches are important aspects of post-secondary environmental educators’ work towards environmental justice, learning to recognize and activate disruptive power provides more options for educators as they work to support student movements and influence their campuses and surrounding communities.

Author

• Nina Porter, Northern Arizona University