Paper short abstract:

Exploring what kind of university politically active students are currently experiencing, envisioning, and shaping, I argue that student activists are moving towards a university as a resonant space of possibility in which current crises are negotiated and which stimulates transformation.

Paper long abstract:

‘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. Thus, Pia picks up on core findings of my ethnographic research on student activism: Politics is a relational act, it arises ‘between-the-humans’ (Arendt 2020, 11), and ‘every order results from the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices’ (Mouffe 2014) – there are alternatives.

Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in Oxford and Cologne, 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.

My paper explores if student activism can be understood as exemplifying a resonant relationship to our world (Rosa 2019) and I argue that a university which refuses a dialogic construction of this world impedes resonance. I draw on Ahmed’s (2014) work on feminist attachment to understand the role of attachment and activism as a relationship to the present that is fueled with expectation which induces and relies on hope. I also explore how students engage in prefigurative political practices as conceptualised by Boggs (2010) to experience both resonance and hope in an institutional setting and a wider higher education landscape that is firmly embedded in intensifying acceleration and growing competition. I thus moreover argue for the necessity of a reflexive, politically engaged higher education research.