Constructing Student Politics: From "Acting in Concert" to Struggle Against the Forms of Subjection

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: Power, Politics, and Reparative Writing

Abstract

This paper will examine the widespread policy discourses that have constructed the notion of student as consumer, and more specifically it will question the implications of such fabrications on student politics. In particular, it will explore the extent to which students have been forced into a position of an ‘animal laboran’ (Arendt 1958), whose primary function is to focus on immediate necessities in highly pressurised university environments. While student politics (as demonstration) might have lost much of its former eminence (Brooks 2017; Klemenčič 2014), I will draw on Foucault (1982, 1984) to investigate the ways in which subtle forms of politics may emerge within a situation where students’ unions have been professionalised and student debt has become a new normality.

Author

• Rille Raaper, Durham University