Strike versus Boycott: discursive repertoires and contention in the 2012 Quebec student strike

Abstract

ABSTRACT Protesting government tuition increases in 2012, Quebec university and college students participated in collective action that they contentiously characterized as a ‘strike.’ While oppositional actors insisted students were boycotting classes – not striking – student activists claimed legal and cultural justifications for their action. This paper asks: How did Quebec student activists discursively characterize and legitimize their protest tactic as a strike? How did this discourse – and opponents’ counter-discourse – structure the terms of the debate within higher education institutions? Using discourse analysis of student newspapers and organizers’ first-hand accounts of the strike, this paper argues that striking students developed a discursive repertoire constituted by two components: they linked their action to a collective identity with a historical legacy of striking and adopted collective action frames that characterized the action as disruptive and collective. While the debate within higher education institutions centred around legitimacy, it was deeply rooted in contestation over individualism versus collectivism and the ongoing neo-liberalization of higher education. Through the case of the 2012 student strike, I propose employing collective identity and collective action frames together in a dialogic framework of discursive repertoires, thereby providing analytical clarity to this concept for social movement scholarship.