Paper short abstract:

#RhodesMustFall in South Africa and Danish everyday student activism (and their resonances) provide the material to investigate how 'translocal articulations' of social justice resonate across borders of time, space and positionality, in multidirectional and amorphous ways.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which contemporary student activism for social justice in Africa and Europe is shaped through processes of translocalisation, revolving around (contested) ‘local’ particularities, including specific demographics, social norms and institutional traditions, as well as convergence and movements across institutional and national borders. Based on Stuart Hall's work, we develop the notion of ‘translocal articulation’ to pay attention to the ways in which students' situated activism simultaneously works to express an opinion and conjure connections (and disconnections) across time, space, and positionality, to demand attention to social justice concerns.

Empirically, we explore the translocality of students' articulations of social justice concerns across two different settings and forms of student activism: First, we explore the digitally networked and highly public activism connected to the South African #RhodesMustFall movement (and its reverberations across South African university campuses and internationally as far as the United States, United Kingdom, India and Uganda). Second, we discuss the less public and less collective forms of everyday activism at universities in Denmark. The comparison between student activism for social justice in the African and European contexts, and their respective connections and disconnections, provides the material to show how translocal articulations resonate across institutional and national borders in multidirectional and amorphous ways.