ABSTRACT
Student protest has existed for as long as there have been students, but the concept of a student movement is a relatively recent phenomenon. With students forming a critical mass in wider society (Rootes, 2012), resultant protests have created significant, attention-stealing moments of agency – from Berkeley’s Battle for People’s Park in 1969, to London’s ‘Millbank’ in 2010. Historically, students have also participated in many movements beyond the campus – from the 1848 revolutions to Occupy – reflecting their wide-ranging political interests and tactics. Yet the amorphous and transitory nature of the student population has limited their ability to build their own movements. Consequently, there is disagreement among scholars whether even peak periods of student protest activity – including the 1960s – represent the work of a unified, overarching student movement (Hanna, 2008; Hoefferle, 2013). Of course, student activists are well aware of these constraints, and have continually
sought ways of creating long-lasting movements out of individual campaigns or events. Achieving this arguably requires both organisational power and a durable collective identity. In the case of the former, activists have historically struggled to maintain student unions’ political focus, at both a local and a national level (Brooks et al., 2015; Ellis, 1998). In the case of the latter, building strong, enduring ties of solidarity and trust out of initial mass-mobilisations not only requires rapprochement between a range of activist groups with differing ideologies and tactical preferences, but also promoting active participation to what often appears an apolitical and apathetic student population. The purpose of this chapter is to identify some of the challenges in building
collective identity – and ergo, a student movement – out of mass-campaigns. Analysis focuses on the 2010/11 UK student protests, and the different experiences, identifications and solidarities which emerged from them. Initial mobilisations in autumn 2010 were unexpectedly widespread and radical: opposing Government plans to treble the cap on tuition fees to £9,000 per year, students responded with large-scale national demonstrations, co-ordinated mass walk-outs, and a network of around 50 campus occupation groups. Translating this energy and unity into a
mass-movement, however, proved largely unsuccessful. Although the autumn protests created solidarities strong enough for a powerful multi-repertoire campaign to emerge, this belied underlying ideological and tactical differences among participants. These differences became more pronounced as distinct identities and solidarities formed around certain protest repertoires, particularly campus occupations.
