Radically democratising education? New student movements,equality and engagement in common,yet plural,worlds

Introduction

Throughout the last decade, the upsurge in student activism across many countries has reasserted the potentially powerful role of students in generating social change (Altbach and Klemenčič, 2014; Brooks, 2017). In the years following the global financial crisis, students have mobilised in great numbers in countries like Chile (2010–2013), Canada (2012), the UK (2010) and, the focus of this article, New Zealand (2011–2012). Although the actions have varied in content and form, common denominators have often been protests against various austerity measures, cutbacks, growing tuition fees and student debt – and in general neo-liberal reforms and the repositioning of education as a private rather than a public and social good. More recently, over the past five years or so, there has also been an increase in student activism targeting various forms of discrimination and marginalisation, especially related to race, gender and sexuality, with the aim of creating a more socially just and inclusive university. These students argue that higher education should be a ‘safe space’, governed by codes of conduct that prevent discrimination and hate speech, and accordingly sometimes ‘no-platform’ and prevent those whose messages they perceive to be offensive from speaking at public events on campus (see, e.g. Ben-Porath, 2017; Palfrey, 2017).

Both forms of mobilisation – against neo-liberal reforms and for social justice – have been criticised for being ‘self-centred’ and carried out on the basis of an individualistic problematic. In the first case, critics argue that students mainly mobilise around issues of direct concern to their own individual situation, e.g. the level of tuition fees and student debt, ignoring wider socio-political aspects (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015). In the second case, students are criticised for putting their own identities at the centre when arguing that the university should be a ‘safe space’ in which no student should experience discrimination, distress or harm (Fox, 2016; Williams, 2016). In both cases, disagreement exists as to whether the students’ radical activism is a token of or a threat to democracy and core western values of critical thinking and free speech (Ben-Porath, 2017; Chemerinsky and Gillman, 2017; George and West, 2017; Palfrey, 2017; Slater, 2016).

In this wider debate about whether radical student activism is an expression of or a threat to democratic conduct, the focus is most often (only) on the publicly visible actions – occupations, blockades, no-platforming protests, etc. However, in order to understand what the relationship between democracy and education comes to mean in the context of radical student activism, it is necessary to pay attention to how such publicly visible protests against various policies, political decisions or practices intersect with, and are conditioned by, the activities in various forms of less publicly visible ‘free spaces’ – such as meetings, reading groups and workshops.

Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork ¹ on radical left-wing student activism in New Zealand in 2012 and 2015, this article explores the notions of ‘democracy’ embedded in the diverse activities of the student activists. ² It first investigates the students’ attempts to democratise the university by creating ‘ruptures’ in the existing socio-political orders through various forms of direct action. It then explores how these public actions go hand in hand with a continuous search for practices and theory that can help students promote horizontal democratic spaces which do not systematically marginalise certain bodies or voices. By doing so, the article argues, the activists constantly work to balance what Barnett (2004: 507; with inspiration from White, 1991: 20) has referred to as two modes of responsibility – namely, a sense of (urgent) ‘responsibility to act’ and a sense of (patient) ‘responsibility to otherness’. That is, the students constantly balance when and how to act in order to change the world with the ability to acknowledge the perspectives or experiences of others and extend their own mutable ‘self’ towards an ‘otherness’.

The article shows how, in their efforts to redemocratise and repoliticise their university and wider society, the student activists constantly mediate their ‘radicality’ along at least three different axes of political ‘otherness’, namely by (1) appearing less radical in body and action, (2) constantly searching for new literature and practices to combat inequality and relating to new kinds of marginalised otherness, and (3) engaging in collaborative and solidarity work outside the university. The challenge seems to be to maintain an openness and ‘undecidability’ in their activities. Only by doing so can they avoid the reinforcement of stereotypical identity categories (e.g. of being a ‘radical leftist student’) and the reduction of their activities into anticipated actions that, due to their very existence, mainly work to legitimate the existing order as democratic. Through processes of collective self-education, the students experiment with principles and practices for equal engagement in a common – yet plural – world. As such, they remind us that democratic engagement, both within the field of education and beyond, is not only a question of political influence, but also has to revolve around the creation of spaces for continuous and collective self-education and experimentation.

(Post-)democracy and educational ‘free spaces’

Critical post-Marxist scholars have argued that most Western countries are today characterised by a growing de-politicisation of society and a move towards what they have called ‘post-politics’ and ‘post-democracy’ (see e.g. Mouffe, 2005; Rancière, 1999, 2010; Žižek, 1999). In their view, a certain understanding of democracy, namely representative liberal democracy, has been naturalised as the only possible form. The rationale of free market economics has become dominant and political problems are reduced to policy problems to be solved by technocrats and experts whose decisions are legitimated through tokenistic participatory processes. Within the wider frame of post-politics, the students’ activities can well be understood as what Wilson and Swyngedouw (2014: 5) have described as the emergence of ‘a range of new forms of politicisation, which mark the present geopolitical landscape in ways that potentially open up an incipient “return of the political”’. Indeed, as we shall see shortly, the student activists in Auckland in 2012 were heavily inspired, by among others, Jacques Rancière and his notions of democracy, dissensus and equality.

However, unlike the post-political literature, this article does not itself resort to one a priori model of what is properly democratic or political. Rather, by examining the activists’ (emic) understanding of ‘democracy’ and exploring how academic literature (on topics including post-politics) inspires the students’ actions, it aims to understand the question of democracy not only in terms of political activities but also as related to pedagogical spaces for (self-)education and learning. In order to do this, as already argued, it explores the publicly visible protests and actions as well as the different and less publicly visible activities and social settings the students establish and engage in.

In social movement literature, these less publicly visible social settings are sometimes conceptualised as ‘free spaces’; that is, ‘small-scale settings within a community or movement that are removed from the direct control of dominant groups, are voluntarily participated in, and generate the cultural challenge that precedes or accompanies political mobilization’ (Polletta, 1999: 1). Some authors have used the concept of ‘free spaces’ interchangeably with concepts such as ‘protected spaces’, ‘cultural laboratories’ and ‘safe spaces’ (see e.g. Evans, 1979). These notions indicate the existence of a space within which people, due to their liberation from repression from dominant groups, can more freely share ideas and experiences, experiment and develop knowledge and skills to question ‘the prevailing common sense that keeps most people passive in the face of injustice’ (Polletta, 1999: 3).

In the view of Evans and Boyte (1986)

Free spaces are the environments in which people are able to learn a new self-respect, a deeper and more assertive group identity, public skills, and values of cooperation and civic virtue. Put simply, free spaces are settings between private lives and large-scale institutions where ordinary citizens can act with dignity, independence, and vision. (17)

In the following sections, I first look at some of the students’ publicly visible actions – including disputes over how and whether to ‘name’ their actions and themselves. I then move on to explore the meaning and role of ‘free spaces’ within the students’ networks and show how these spaces are linked to discussions about power hierarchies, processes of marginalisation and the challenges of not creating a clique-like, homogeneous and exclusive group. In particular, I look at whether and how the students come to ‘learn a vision of the common good in the course of struggling for change’, as Evans and Boyte put it.

Performatively re-claiming the university

In 2011–2012, activist students in Auckland, New Zealand, successfully mobilised several hundred of students in protest against, amongst other things, tuition fee hikes, the national budget and the introduction of a voluntary student membership bill. With a sense of being in the midst of a revival in student activism and political engagement to a degree not seen for decades, networks of student activists organised rallies, occupations, teach-ins and other forms of direct action like chaining themselves to strategic places and blockading central public roads. They described the aim of these direct actions in terms of attempts to ‘politicise the non-political’, ‘disturb the normal order’, ‘release a political performance of contesting space’ or ‘playing with that space of … the distribution of the sensible, of what students are and are not, of what should and should not be done as a student’.

These descriptions were clearly inspired by, among others, Jacques Rancière’s understanding of democracy and politics. To Rancière (1999, 2010), democracy is not a question of political government or representation. Rather, democracy is about the destabilisation of the existing ‘distribution of the sensible’; that is, the dominant ways of categorising and distributing bodies and voices, which anticipate what becomes thinkable and possible in different places. Democracy here refers to the act of political subjectivisation, which disturbs and disrupts this order by demonstrating a wrong of ‘the part with no part’. Put differently, democracy is about breaking open the dominant distribution of the sensible and creating new forms of common worlds, where hitherto excluded groups – in this case the students – manifest that they are equal and also have a part (see also Simons and Masschelein, 2013).

For many of the student activists, the first real sense of rupture emerged at a somewhat accidental occupation in 2011, I was told. After a teach-in on human rights in the library’s basement, which developed into a conversation about the problematic state of what they criticised as the neo-liberalised and commercialised university, around 40 students continued their debate despite the security personnel’s requests that they leave the building. As a result, they were locked in the basement. Brian, one of the participants, said:

when the doors locked, something sort of changed in the atmosphere … and everyone sort of feeling ‘we just barricade’, and started barricading the doors. … And that night something just changed and the idea that they [the university management] had all this power over us was just exposed as a fiction. There was sort of a rupture and sort of we realized that we could do this. (Brian, student activist, 2012)

Prefiguring the democratic university through educational ‘free spaces’?

Even though the activist students successfully mobilised hundreds of fellow students for demonstrations, rallies and occupations in 2011–2012, these efforts, they said, had not led to direct and tangible results in terms of politicians or university management withdrawing or changing their political initiatives. Nevertheless, the student activists I talked to felt that it had been worth it. In fact, some of them explicitly said that the big events and mobilisations had not been the most important aspect of their engagement. Rather, other activities, like engaging in reading groups, developing and participating in various workshops and in general experimenting with organisational forms and meeting formats, had been just as central to them. In different ways, meetings, reading groups and workshops were settings in which, often a smaller group of, activist students would share ideas, discuss previous and future actions and plans, and engage in a common process of experimentation and learning.

These settings, therefore, can be understood as ‘free spaces’ (introduced above) that go hand in hand with the more externally oriented actions and – in terms of their democratic ideals – seemed to work as what Polletta (1999: 11) has called prefigurative free spaces. While the concept of prefiguration has been used in slightly different ways (see Graeber, 2002; Maeckelbergh, 2011; Yates, 2015), it is generally understood as practices through which actors enact and anticipate in the present the democratic and more socially just society that they hope to bring about in the future. For recent movements on the Left, a central prefigurative mechanism has been the experimentation with leaderless, horizontal and direct democratic techniques to evoke egalitarian decision-making – something which was also central to the student activists in Auckland.

In contrast to the dominant forms of organising through representative democracy, these students constantly strived towards creating what they called horizontal and organic spaces; leaderless spaces without hierarchies where ‘you just have different roles’, as one of them put it. In order to achieve a horizontal, organic and leaderless space, they sometimes also used so-called ‘progressive stacking’ – a technique inspired by the Occupy movement, in which some of them had been involved in Auckland. The aim is to provide marginalised groups (who the students feel are often silenced or ignored in traditional representative democracy) a better chance to speak. In order to do so, a facilitator balances the order of speakers to allow people from minority and non-dominant groups to speak before or in greater number than people from majority groups. Furthermore, the students would also make sure that more experienced activists helped newcomers, making sure they could follow the conversation and obtain a proper space to talk.

The ideal of a flat, horizontal space was also manifested in the way they created different teams or cells within the network (e.g. legal, media and logistics cells). Ideally, people should be capable of rotating across the different teams, both to avoid leadership and to ensure that various people would acquire the necessary skills and could take over from each other. To qualify people for this kind of engagement, they organised a number of workshops on topics including facilitation of meetings, the legal issues related to their activism and how best to deal with the media. Students with different disciplinary backgrounds, e.g. in law or communication, and sometimes an invited staff-member with particular expertise, would share knowledge regarding different issues. This kind of decentralisation of knowledge and skills also proved beneficial at occupations or demonstrations where the police targeted what they perceived to be the ‘leaders’, notably those speaking in megaphones, because the megaphone could just be passed on to other activists who would be capable of speaking with confidence. Jim here referred to classic ideas in ancient Greek democracy:

So … democracy among the Greeks was notably nonelected; it was randomized (…) and there is a certain resilience in this kind of decentralization that is really positive [in that individuals can come and go without it falling apart]. And I think it demonstrates precisely that alternative modes to social organization are possible, albeit difficult. And I think that’s encouraging for anyone who is interested in social change, that we don’t have to limit ourselves to the same old forms. (Jim, student activist, 2012)

In a similar way, several of the students I talked to found these spaces (meetings, reading groups, workshops, etc.) valuable in their own right – as educative spaces that should definitely inform practice, but not necessarily with mobilisation as the only goal. Jim said:

I’ve learned so much this year about engagement and organization. More than I ever learned from my management degree … so as an experiment, I think it’s been positive (…) we don’t have these types of social organisations and voices of life. I’ve never been part of a group like this (…) and I kind of oscillate between what’s more important, the actions or the workshops, but in terms of my visions for education, I get slightly more excited by these sort of horizontally grown workshops (…) and the practice readings as well, in educating ourselves, and so I quite like the fact that we sort of, we started to develop these sort of student educational spaces. (…) In terms of what I get really excited about, it’s not about a student movement; it’s about the fact that we’re creating new things, new forms of organization. (Jim, student activist, 2012)

Responsibility to otherness – A question of discomfort or safety?

The unsettled and experimental character of the students’ engagement is central to the question of democracy as a way of being-with-others. Here, Barnett’s (2004) discussion of how to balance ‘responsibility to act’ with ‘responsibility to otherness’ is relevant. To what extent, for example, were the students’ activities preconditioned by the development of a relatively homogeneous community or identity through constitutive acts of exclusion? To what extent did they ‘develop a sense of subjectivity and community as being constituted by an opening up to otherness’ (Barnett, 2004: 514)?

Frankie, a student activist in 2012, described both education and political activism as activities that aim to push people out of their ‘comfort zone’, making them see and experience the world in a different way. However, others, like Simon, who was active when I returned in 2015, talked about changing the university and wider society to become a more inclusive and ‘safe space’ for all. Simon identified as queer and seemingly related to a more marginalised position within the university than Frankie, who was a white, straight and academically competent student from a upper-middle-class background.

The difference between, on the one hand, Frankie’s emphasis on the university as a place of ‘discomfort’ and, on the other, Simon’s as a ‘safe space’ is central to understanding the various ways of extending towards ‘otherness’ that the students constantly negotiated. The difference can be understood in light of Ben-Porath's (2017) distinction between ‘intellectual safety’ and ‘dignitary safety’. Frankie – as we shall see shortly – seemed to understand comfort in terms of ‘intellectual safety’ and argued that education and activism should work to drive people towards new intellectual insights. Simon, however, seemed to emphasise that university should be a space of ‘dignitary safety’ for all – both mentally and physically – no matter gender, race, sexuality or ability. Indeed, Simon was part of group of queer activist students who had become an active presence on campus around 2014–2015. The newer students, Simon said, ‘tend to be from a queer background, so very much identity politics background, but still have the same sense of politics of kind of emancipatory politics [as the older activists].’ Accordingly, they had also introduced other practices to create a more inclusive environment:

We do a pronoun round at meetings. It's basically a recognition of the fact that we want to make this world a … safe space (…) say if I called a drag trans-woman, like, he or him, it could make them feel incredibly unsafe, because there is that threat of violence, so basically making it a safe space. (Simon, student and queer activist, 2015)

Being radical in ‘a little pussy bow’

A central point of discussion among the activist students revolved around the kinds of actions they should instigate, and how ‘radical’ and disruptive or ‘moderate’ and inclusive these should be – that is, to what extent they should reflect divergent notions of democracy as a necessarily disruptive action or as a question of engaged deliberation in a wider community. Some felt that only more radical actions were effective, like occupations, effigy burning or the handcuffing of oneself to central administrative places which would successfully disrupt the administration. Others argued that such activities would alienate the wider student body and preferred to collect petitions and organise less confrontational direct actions; for example, a ‘street party’ against increased tuition fees that would potentially appeal to more students.

As noted above, one student activist, Frankie, related activism and education to a process of moving outside one’s comfort zone. When I talked to her in 2012, she had been quite active in several of the protests and actions, but seemed not to be at the core of the group of student activists. She was sceptical about the way some of the others tended to perform and reconfirm a stereotype of the ‘raggedy leftist students, which is what the media portrays us as as well’, as she put it. When advancing this critique, she also distanced herself from the others and shifted from an ‘us’ to a ‘them’:

Frankie: it’s interesting then because, if you kind of spend long enough in this way of thinking, then that becomes your comfort zone… it does annoy me the kind of like performing being a lefty student. (…) and I think that that kind of way of thinking weakens them rather than strengthens the movement because it does become about, you know, identity politics rather than actual politics

GBN: is it because you’re not as radical as some of the others?

Frankie: No, I’m all for that, but I can do it in a little pussy bow rather than in my combat boots. (…) I consciously turn up in my most pretty outfit. So it looks like at least, at least in terms of aesthetics, it looks like the diversity of student interest. (…) I don’t see why you have to ‘perform’ your activism; just do it, you know. (…) like, if you kind of get [other] people in their comfort zone, where you look ‘legitimate’ or you look, you know, ‘normal’, and you’re kind of spouting like kind of radical ideas, I think people are more willing to listen to you. (…) there’s a way of pushing people in to kind of thinking slightly differently that’s less confrontational.

From theory to practice – and back again: The brocialist enemy within

The second kind of otherness towards which the activist students constantly oscillated concerned intersectional marginalisation. Through various reading groups and meetings, they seemed to continuously attempt to grasp the experiences of marginalised positions related to intersections of especially class, gender, race and sexuality – experiences that for the group in 2012 were most often not their own. In 2012, the most active students, who often, and sometimes unwillingly, were associated with WATU, had developed from a core group of sociology students to a wider group including students of anthropology, philosophy and related disciplines. They were largely racialised as white, often academically abled and/or with a relatively privileged middle-class background. Initially, many of them had read various kinds of critical anti-capitalist theory and literature on utopian movements and emancipatory pedagogy. But their readings continuously developed, reflecting the internal dynamics in the activist network and their aim to bring about equality and social justice, both inside and outside of their network. Jim, who was active in 2012, explained how a big assembly meeting held after one of their actions, where they had mobilised hundreds of students, had led him and others to revise their readings and practices:

There’s always the problem of informal hierarchy within the group; there’s obviously people with loud voices. We constantly have to fight against patriarchy and racism within the group. At the big meeting, it was quite traumatizing for many people. One guy continuously argued that we need to elect people and critiqued progressive stacking for reverse racism, then a woman pointed out that you can’t just keep talking. You need to be quiet sometimes. And he cut her off and he said no, that will be silencing other people’s voices. Immediately after, some of us created a feminist reading group [and subsequently] a feminist working group to address sexist, ehm the patriarchy within the group. And similarly, the post-colonial reading, we were like, well, we have Maori, Pasifika students who we always talk about as being affected disproportionally (…) but most of the people in the group are largely pakeha [here, meaning white]. So why aren’t we getting more people? These are discussions, which sort of come up and go, you have to constantly push to the surface. (Jim, student activist, 2012)

Jim linked the friction that emerged at the meeting to the term ‘brocialist’ – a term that came up in many of my interviews as a criticism of the organisational structures, power hierarchies and political prioritisations within other socialist traditions. ‘Some brocialists [from socialist groups on campus] come to us and ask ‘what is your manifesto’, ‘what is the aim of your fight’. They want structures and leaders (…) you know, that vanguard order type mentality’, Martin explained and contrasted it to their own ideals of flat democracy and a plurality of political agendas. This difference in political organising also related to the questions of class, race, gender and sexuality. When explaining the notion of brocialist, Jim said ‘it’s like, first we deal with class and capitalism, and patriarchy and racism will sort itself out afterwards, which I hate’. Likewise, Nina described a brocialist as ‘like the white male cis socialist who is a class reductionist and marginalises everyone else because everything comes down to class, kind of’.

Their own ideals of flat, organic democracy, attention to all sorts of marginalisation and a plurality of intersecting political agendas, however, were not easily realised. Indeed, in 2015, with the emergence of the new group of activist queer students, some of the older (and former WATU) radical activists became the target of criticism themselves. Nina, who had been active since 2011, explained:

there’s almost a lot of in-fighting there, where like, you know, people being accused of homophobia and anti-Semitism (…) that charge laid against some of the white male members of the group in really personal ways (…) you know, charge you with being brocialist. (Nina, older student activist, 2015)

Mediating your radicality through solidarity and collaboration

For some students, like Yasmin, collaboration and solidarity were central for the wider project of promoting a more just and democratic society. In addition to activism on campus, Yasmin had been involved in state housing activism for several years, fighting against the demolition of houses in a poorer area of Auckland, predominantly inhabited by Maori people. Yasmin, who in 2015 was a 25-year-old post-graduate student, was both critical of and sympathetic to some of the (often younger) queer students' engagement. She did understand their reasons for taking a point of departure in their queer identity, but felt that they would benefit from broader engagement and deeper analyses of the systemic inequalities in society. Yasmin said

getting involved in community projects is really important and also kind of destroying the elitist aspect of the universities (…) when you interact with other groups or at least when we have a chat with other groups, you’re kind of forced to reform yourselves, yeah, mediate your radicality, (…) It takes time to realise that you need to organize with other groups. It takes organizing with many different groups of people to realise that you cannot be at the centre or be in a safe space all the time. (Yasmin, older activist involved in student and housing activism, 2015)

Conclusion

In the 1960s, students fought to democratise their universities and wider society. They protested for the right to free speech and engagement in political activities at the university, for research and teaching to be more relevant to ‘the people’, and for greater student influence on university governing bodies and on educational issues more generally (Vinen, 2018). Today, 50 years on, the student population is widely described as politically passive or apathetic, with consumer power being a central source of political influence (Brooks, 2017). The increasingly ‘professionalised’ student unions struggle to establish a grass-root foundation and sometimes come to function more as service-providers than actual political organisations (Brooks et al., 2014; Klemenčič, 2014).

Radical student activists – in line with and inspired by among others post-Marxist scholars – understand these shifts in the role of students as examples of a more general de-politicisation. With their actions, they aim to re-politicise and re-democratise their universities and wider society by challenging the predominant ideas about what democracy is and making oppressive relations visible in order to challenge and change them. To the activist students, democracy becomes a question of disrupting the existing orders – of dismantling and breaking open the dominant distribution of bodies and voices and creating new forms of common worlds, in which hitherto excluded groups manifest that they are equal and also have a part. This goal is translated into various forms of direct action – including occupations and blockades – as well as more prefigurative practices of horizontal, leaderless and organic organising.

The main challenge in their activism seems to be one of creating and ‘imagining relations of being-with-others that are not reducible to the poles of assimilation or absolute difference’ (Barnett, 2004: 518). How to conjure common – yet plural – worlds that are inclusive and socially just? The first group of activist students in 2011–2012 faced the challenge of being relatively homogeneous in terms of theoretical inspiration, socio-economic background, race and sexuality. When a new group of students with a more marginalised background entered the scene, friction momentarily emerged, testifying to the intrinsic danger in social justice activism of fragmentation and annihilation of a wider community. Furthermore, their attempts to promote new political subjectivities were also challenged by dominant logics of representation and categorisation, where they were often represented by other students and in the media as a minor and stereotypical group of ‘radical leftist’ students who engage in anticipated, almost ritualised, performance.

However, when taking a closer look at their activities and reflections, their political subjectivity was very much dependent on the exposure to difference and a continuous extension towards various forms of otherness. Indeed, in their activities, it is the maintenance of a degree of undecidability, experimentation and openness towards shifting forms of otherness that most strongly seem to outline a different kind of world-in-common. This shows that their political identity is not (only) defined through fights against particular political initiatives and the establishment of a ‘we’ against a ‘they’, but (also) is to be understood in terms of openness and attempts to extend towards and engage with various forms of otherness. By doing so, they remind us that democratic engagement, within the field of education and beyond, is not only a question of (political) influence and participation, but always also has to revolve around the creation of spaces for continuous and collective self-education and experimentation.