The New School Struggles: Interpreting Africa's Current Wave of Educational Activism

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: Comparative Education Policy and Politics

Abstract

In response to the resurgence of educational activism in recent years, a growing body of scholarship investigates the relationship between schools and contemporary political struggles. This literature tends to geographically focus on protests in North America and Europe with little analysis of Africa, which is in the midst of a new wave of school-based protests. This paper attends to this gap in existing scholarship and presents data from the School Protests in Africa Database (SPAD), in which we have aggregated more than 1,100 unique school-based protests in 54 African countries since the year 2000. This paper analyzes the incidence of school protests in in Africa, their explicit causes as defined by participants, and patterns that exists within and across countries.

Author

• Krystal Strong, University of Pennsylvania