Campaigning for a Movement: Collective identity and Student Solidarity in the 2010/11 UK Protests against Fees and Cuts

Abstract

Despite its ubiquity as the term, ‘student movements’ are not easy to build or sustain. This is because campus activism typically features a diversity of political views and tactical preferences, and is organisationally restricted by the constant turnover of graduating cohorts. This chapter uses the 2010/11 UK student protests to explore some of the challenges students face in building a wider student movement. United initially by a common grievance of rising tuition fees, students responded quickly with a multi-repertoire mass campaign. Yet its tactical breadth generated diverging collective experiences and identities, and once the fees were passed by Government these identities proved difficult to unite as an overarching movement.