The University and Social Justice: Struggles Across the Globe by Aziz Choudry

The University and Social Justice: Struggles Across the Globe Reviews

• 
  Malcolm

  After close to all my adult life being spent in and around Universities, as a student, as a staff member in various capacities or (briefly) as an employee of student unions, I’ve come to recognise the great paradox that is their reputation as centres of universal dissent. They are, after all, the training grounds of the elite – some might say the finishing schools of the bourgeoisie creaming off those who come to dominate the state and business. Yet they are sites of dissent, of ideas development and of struggle and resistance, as not all of the elite-in-training drink the Kool-Aid. Not only is the University therefore seen as a complex institution of transition and unruliness, but social justice is cast in many lights through this collection, as is appropriate for struggles grounded in their specific circumstances. What’s more, for the most part our impressionistic understanding of campus and especially student is framed by a (boomer) mythology of 1968 as the one authentic politics – yet as this collection shows contemporary repertoires of action are much more diverse than this allows.
  
  Many of the papers here adopt analyses grounded in broadly cast social science methods, looking at the characteristics of social movements, at the social, cultural and economic conditions on the ground and on long and medium run trends in politics. Jaime Woodcock for instance looks at the recent genealogy of the UK’s 21st century student movement and the extension of those skills and knowledges organisers developed in later struggles focusing especially on workers’ rights. Similarly, Juliet Le Mazier explores the repertoire of actions and tactics available to the French student struggles over a longer time frame, and the tensions in the emphasis on those tactics when deployed by different political tendencies.
  
  Others explore the articulation of higher education focused struggles to wider social forces, such as Lena Meari and Rula Abu Douhu’s discussion of the tensions between class and national liberation struggles in the Palestinian student movement focused on Bir Zeit University. Traversing a related set of social forces Rabah Ibrahim Abdulhadi and Saliem Shahedeh consider the political, commercial and academic pressures on and from the neo-liberal university over issues of Palestine and Zionism at Cal State San Francisco. The place of university based struggles for social justice is seen through discourses and practices of nationalism in rosalind hampton’s evaluation of the Quebecois movements and Rhoda Nanre Nafziger and Krysta Strong on the forms of student struggles in Nigeria. These links to wider struggles are also seen in Javier Campos-Martinez and Dayana Olivarria’s unpacking of university activist politics in Chile, focusing on the generation born after the end of the dictatorship, while Alma Maldonado-Maldonado and Vania Bañelos Astorga consider similar questions in their discussion of recent moments in the Mexican student movement, but in this case looking at how the moments of action were cast in respect of wider articulations.
  
  These analyses give us good insight to the state of university focused struggles, but for me there are three that stand out as focusing on specific educational questions – not as sites or moments of struggle but as more profound modes of analysis: this I note reflects my theoretical and analytical interests, as distinct from a focus I also have on social movements as moments and forms of struggle, which where my engagement with the chapters mentioned so far comes from. Prem Kumar Vijayan considers student movements as both left leaning and progressive and conservative or reactionary tendencies in his discussion of Indian activists, but also problematises students as unruly, as insurgent, as (although this is not his term) liminal and therefore dangerous – so in need of control and disciplining by the state, by institutions and by reactionary and conservative social forces. I really enjoyed Asher Gamedze and Leigh-Ann Naidoo’s focused discussion not of a movement as a whole but of a project centred a decolonial methodology to produce a movement record, a publication (or what they call publica(c)tion) that drew on the range of struggles across South Africa and engage local and specific issues as well provide a pedagogic project. Similarly, Sarah Raymondo and Karlo Mikhail I Mongaya explore pedagogic question in their long-run analysis of the Philippines, considering the tensions between education for material(ist) social change and for intellectual transformation, as well as the continuing colonial structures of postcolonial (as in ‘independent’) Philippines and transformative social education. I admit it may be that part of my resonance with these last two is many years of engagement with the movements in the Philippines and South Africa, but the depth of these explorations as questions of educational social justice captured my imagination.
  
  Choudry and Vally have assembled a collection of analysts with deep engagements the movements they’re discussing as leaders, as protagonists, as activists of various forms which gives this collection a richness and immediacy. There’s a refreshingly broad range of political tendencies explored, and I suspect invoked by the analysts, and a refreshingly untendentious style. Given that, as Gamezde and Naidoo correctly argue, much of the analysis of activism of this kind is dominated by cis-het male voices, the strong (majority) presence of women in the line-up of authors is also to be celebrated. It’s the kind of collective analysis we need of the current wider range of social movements, and an important contribution to understandings of contemporary activism. Highly recommended.