Capitalism, Political Participation and the Student as a Revolutionary Figure

Abstract

This chapter explores students’ shifting forms of political and pedagogical participation since the early nineteenth century and in particular from the 1960s until the present. In combining historical enquiries with ethnographic fieldwork, it investigates how students have influenced and participated in the shaping of the university and larger society, and how their room for decision-making and their political activities have changed over the last two centuries. The chapter draws on and further develops the notion of ‘figure’ and ‘figuration’ used by, amongst others, feminist oriented thinkers. By focusing on moments of friction as generative sites where conflicting student figures are momentarily formed, the chapter discusses the emergence and transformation of the student as a revolutionary and transformative figure. It shows how different groups of students, in order to promote social and political change, have prioritised different forms of political participation and conjured up and located themselves in different kinds of social wholes (e.g. the student body, the people, a generation of youth). It identifies a contemporary shift towards new modes of flexible and single-issue oriented participation and argues that this can potentially work as either a creative form of anti-capitalism or an adaption to capitalism which has itself become flexible and networked.