Resonance, Hope and Prefiguration in Contemporary Transformative Student Politics: Researching and Representing the Complexities of Student Protest

• In Event: Education and Activism Redux I

Proposal

‘You can talk about it, it’s man-made, that’s why you can change it’, my conversation partner and student activist Pia summarises her stance towards (student) politics. In this way, Pia picks up on two core elements of this year’s CIES call for submissions: Protest is a public act, it arises ‘between-the-humans’ (Arendt 2020, 11), and it is exactly the attachments made through dialogue and community-building, i.e., collective action, which makes the generation of power and the initiation of change possible. Experiences of and the search for hope weave like a thread through these activities, not least through prefigurative political actions – like the ‘small acts’ of contradiction and resistance mentioned in CIES’ call. Pia who advocates for gender equality at university and for collective agreements for student employees is aware of the breadth and variety of forms which student activism can take: filing a motion at the student parliament and social media work, organising protest and hosting cooking evenings in the neoliberal university. She is convinced that being a student is inherently political; she is convinced of the power of protest.
Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in Oxford, UK, and Cologne, Germany, in 2021/2022, I explore the role of resonance, hope and prefiguration in contemporary transformative student politics. A key focus of my work is on how students reflect on and understand their activism, and how the specific university context shapes their actions and visions. Positioning myself as an activist scholar, I work with students active in the fields of climate justice, demilitarisation and decolonisation, participating, observing and conducting ethnographic conversations over the course of a year. The topics of these conversations cover, but are not limited to tensions between collaboration and antagonism regarding university management, Higher Education Acts and their influence on student politics, generation change and coalitions, momentum, outreach and standstill in a political movement, the role of emotions and empathy for transformative political encounters, care, belonging and queer chosen families, the role of the biography and mental, financial and temporal resources, media coverage of student politics, the university as a space of political (im)possibility, and demilitarising personal and political relationships and communication.
My doctoral research constitutes the basis for my paper on researching and representing the complexities of student protest. The former explores if student politics can be understood as exemplifying a resonant relationship to our world and thus asks about both the institutional and political as well as the personal, affective, and emotional conditions under which student politics becomes possible. Sociologist and successor of Critical Theory Rosa (2019) differentiates between resonant, or responsive, relationships to the world, inter alia as prerequisite of functioning democracies, and mute relationships, i.e., experiences of alienation. Drawing on Rosa’s work I explore cases of students being called upon (affect), their subsequent engagement (emotion) and the political practices with which they react to these encounters (self-efficacy). Rosa argues that education fundamentally is about cultivating relationships to the world, and I ask if and how the university acts as a particular space and the years of study as a particular time span for students to establish stable axes of resonance. I argue that a university which refuses a collective and dialogic construction of this world ultimately impedes resonance although it holds manifold potential to be a resonant space and to enable students to establish stable axes of resonance.
For this purpose, I trace student politics both within and beyond institutional structures of student representation and self-government. Drawing on auto-ethnography, I trace the continual shifting between hope and hopelessness during my fieldwork and in student politics more broadly. I draw on Ahmed’s (2014) work on feminist attachment to understand the role of political attachment and encounter as well as a certain relationship to the present that is fueled with expectation and request which both induces and relies on hope.
Thirdly, I explore how students engage in prefigurative political practices to create possibilities for experiences of both resonance and hope. Here, I explore how students experiment with possibilities of (more direct, more perceptible) change by engaging in prefigurative political practice as conceptualised by Boggs (2010) as 'the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal'.
All this ultimately leads to the question of what kind of university politically active students are currently experiencing, continuously envisioning, and trying to shape. Here I argue that the students are moving towards a university experienced as a space of political possibility that stimulates nuanced discussion and courageous transformation. Through their political practices, students demand, exploit, and widen the university's potential to be such a resonant space which enables experiences of self-efficacy – in an institutional setting and a wider higher education landscape that is firmly embedded in intensifying acceleration and growing competition.
Based on reflections arising from my doctoral research, my paper’s contribution lies in answering the questions how I research and represent the complexities of protest. Firstly, my doctoral research takes a distinct ethnographic view on student politics – a topic that is rarely addressed explicitly ethnographically, if addressed at all (cf. Meyer 2022, 2). Positioning myself as an activist scholar and including autoethnographic elements, my paper therefore deals with questions around researcher positionality in higher education research on protest and argues for the necessity of a reflexive, politically engaged higher education research – today more than ever before. CIES’ call virtually demands that we as researchers take responsibility, in and through our research, and I present my experiences of putting this into practice. Secondly, I trace the dilemmas I have encountered throughout the three-year-long period of my doctoral research: from the formulation of the research focus and fieldwork to the writing process and the final presentation of protest in my thesis. A look into the modes of presentation of research findings in which I performatively try to do justice to the complex, prefigurative and open-ended character of student protest rounds my paper off.

Author

• Lavinia Kamphausen, Department of Education, University of Oxford