ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, a growing number of students worldwide have protested against reforms of public universities, including cutbacks, increased tuition fees, new public management-inspired governance systems and new market-based and competitive funding principles (Altbach and Klemencˇicˇ, 2014). With Denmark as the prism, this chapter explores politically active students’1 various attempts to influence such reforms and shows how students’ politics and protests can be seen as processes or moments of value negotiation; what they are negotiating, I argue, is not just the value of university education as a social or private good in a narrow economic sense but more broadly what the value of public institutions and democracy is and should be, including fundamental questions about students’ political participation and what it means to be a good citizen. In Denmark, economic redistribution and extensive free public services are still
cornerstones of welfare state politics. Accordingly, domestic students in Denmark are not charged any fees at all. In fact, based on the rationale that everyone, independent of economic background, should have equal access to education, students receive a monthly study grant (as of 2015 equivalent to c.€800/$865). Importantly, however, the development of the Danish welfare society in the period since World War II can also be linked to particular ideals and ideas of efficiency in
democratic processes and political decision-making in terms of structures for representative democracy as well as traditions that see democracy as a form of life oriented towards creating consensus and community (Green-Pedersen et al., 2004: 43; Koch, 1981). The value of welfare – and thereby of the public university – is therefore not just a question of economic redistribution and free education. It can also be seen as a question of what the anthropologists Langer and Højlund (2011) call ‘well-faring’ and how to ‘fare well’ in society. Rather than merely being an objective and measurable value, welfare here becomes an ethical orientation, including certain norms for appropriate behaviour and democratic participation. The fact that the notion of ‘value’ has multiple meanings – often described as a
contrast between (economic) value and (social or cultural) values; or value as price and value as priceless (see e.g. Graeber, 2001; Skeggs 2014) – makes it both a challenging and an interesting concept to work with. Like Miller (2008), I find it fruitful because it directs our attention to and allows us to study the relationship between the economic and the other-than-economic. Indeed, it seems that processes of valuation and valuing is a growing field of study within various disciplines (see e.g. Antal et al., 2015; Helgesson and Kjellberg, 2013; Lamont, 2012; Muniesa and Helgesson, 2013; see also Dewey, 1939). This chapter, however, is mainly inspired by anthropological value theory (see e.g. Graeber, 2001; Munn, 1986) and explores the other-than-economic value of welfare as a question of the way politically engaged students ‘measure the importance of their own actions, as reflected in one or another socially recognized form’ (Graeber, 2001: 47, 230). This means that politically active students are not only engaged in shaping the value(s) of public welfare through the content of, and arguments put forward in, their parliamentary and extra-parliamentary work. They also enact and value public welfare in particular ways in and through their various forms of political involvement. By taking this approach, where I see politics as fundamentally ‘the struggle to
establish what value is’ (Graeber, 2001: 88), I also engage with the question of what the meaning of public – in public welfare and the public university – comes to be. Contested values of public welfare, I show, emerge and circulate through particular modes of political performance which summon or conjure up different kinds of ‘publics’ (cf. Mahoney and Clarke, 2013; Newman and Clarke, 2009). A public (as well as the public) is a diffuse and multi-faceted concept (see e.g. Fraser, 1990; Warner, 2002). Here, I take a public to entail a group of indefinite and uncountable strangers who are linked through a common interest about which they engage in an ongoing conversation. In this perspective, the public sphere consists of many intersecting publics, where both particular interests as well as common goals may be constituted and contested (Warner, 2002). Publics, as Mahoney and Clarke (2013: 937) have argued, therefore emerge around particular objects of concern; they articulate these concerns through particular mediums or what I call modes of performance; and they gather together and draw on the agency of plural, multiple social subjects variously affected by the issues of concern. Paraphrasing Mahoney and Clarke (ibid.: 936), one can say that different values are inscribed into and acted out through different modes of performance and
‘public-making’ initiatives in diverse contexts of student politics and protests. Therefore, rather than being a stable and pre-existing collective subject, in this chapter I emphasise that a public only exists by virtue of being addressed (Warner, 2002: 50) and, inspired by Mahoney and Clarke (2013), I focus on the ways that different political processes work to summon and call into existence different publics. In order to analyse how politically active students call into existence different
kinds of publics, in the following I draw primarily on ethnographic fieldwork material generated in the period between 2005 and 2008. This material has been used and analysed in slightly different ways elsewhere (see Nielsen, 2015a). The main methods used in the fieldwork were participant observation, informal
conversations and semi-structured interviews (23 in all) with politically involved students within the Danish National Union of Students, the student councils at three different Danish universities and more loosely organised networks. With the point of departure being students’ conflicting attempts to influence a 2006 welfare reform proposal, the chapter shows how different student organisations and networks emphasise different modes of political performance based on conflicting ideas about the effectiveness and legitimacy of (1) representative parliamentary work, (2) eventful activist mobilisation and (3) everyday exemplary acts of resistance and prefiguration. Prefiguration here refers to political activities, e.g. particular decisionmaking processes, which are seen as an anticipation and manifestation of a better society here and now by the groups of students who use and develop them (cf. Smucker, 2014). I argue that the different claims of ‘representation’, ‘mobilisation’ and ‘exemplarity/prefiguration’ work to locate students and student politics within different kinds of publics and thereby come to enact and form the value(s) of the public university and, more generally, of public welfare in quite different ways.
