[ecrea] CFP: Media and Student Protest

*Call of papers: Special Issue of/African Journalism Studies/: Media and 
Student Protest*

*Edited by Herman Wasserman and Shakuntala Rao*

**

  From Cape Town to Delhi to Oxford, from Santiago to Sheffield, in 
Senegal, Kenya, the US and Canada - student protest defines our 
contemporary times.  In South Africa, student protests demanding the 
decolonization of tertiary education have led to the closure of 
universities and violent clashes on campuses nationwide.  At Jawaharlal 
Nehru University in Delhi, students were arrested for ‘anti-Indian’ 
slogans, students at Oxford – like their counterparts in Cape Town – 
have demanded the removal of a statue of the colonialist Cecil John 
Rhodes and students across the US have marched to demand safer space for 
women and people of colour.  In Sheffield, students occupied an 
auditorium to protest the marketization of higher education in the UK, 
while Ethiopian students have been involved in deadly protests by the 
Oromo ethnic group. These protests resonate with others over different 
yet related issues, such as the  #blacklivesmatter protests against 
police brutality that were appropriated by students protesting in South 
Africa, and have historical antecedents, for example, the Je'n a Marre 
protests  at Cheikh Anta Diop University in 2011 that played a key role 
in the fall of President Abdolaye Wade.  In this context it is also 
fitting to recall that this year marks the 40^th anniversary of the 
Soweto uprising in South Africa, where students clashed with police in a 
deadly confrontation with the apartheid state.

Students have claimed public and digital spaces in response to local and 
global injustices, such as structural racism, sexual violence, material 
inequalities, political oppression, and corrupt nexus of universities, 
governments, and corporations. Paul Gilroy writes about the ‘shared 
vocabulary’ that linked students around the world by means of the 
internet, a‘shared poetics’ that ‘helps them to constitute a virtual 
community which may be widely dispersed’.Particularly striking is that 
these student protests have not been initiated or directed by 
traditional social movement organizations, but appear to be spontaneous 
movements ‘from below.'While these instances and events of popular 
contestation have been celebrated, the protests have been called into 
question for their durability. Further, such protests are at risk of 
being perceived as obsolete in the lights of colonial and national 
independences and civil rights victories, giving the illusion that the 
world has resolved structural injustices and that we are now living in a 
post-racial, post-feminist, post-gay and post-colonial moment. Student 
protests in places like India and Chile have also incited backlash, 
leading to state-sanctioned violence, repression, surveillance, and 
other disciplinary measures.

As was the case with the protests of the ‘Arab Spring’, it is easy to 
overstate the role of social media in amplifying the social forces that 
led to the protests. Yet the rise and use of social media, hashtag 
communication initiated via Twitter and Facebook, have undeniably become 
‘spaces’ where discussions of injustices and political action are taking 
place.  The legacy media of newspapers, television and radio often had 
difficulty catching up with events as they unfolded online, yet 
performed important curatorial and analytical functions that framed the 
protests in significant ways.

Some of the questions we invite contributors to this special issue to 
ask are:

· What is the role of media in initiating student protest and social change?

· Do media technologies reconfigure the ways we protest, express 
dissent, build coalitions and mobilize collective action?

· Is there a space for protest in the neoliberal university? Which 
protests are heard and by whom, and how is the process of speaking and 
listening facilitated by various forms of media?

· What are the connections between identity politics, protest and media?

Deadline for submissions:  1 October 2016.

Manuscripts should be uploaded to Manuscript 
Central,https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/recq and conform to/African 
Journalism Studies’/editorial guidelines, found 
here:http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=recq20&page=instructions

Herman Wasserman

Professor of Media Studies

Director: Centre for Film and Media Studies

University of Cape Town

Private Bag X3

Rondebosch

7700

South Africa


Email <mailto:(herman.wasserman /at/ uct.ac.za)>

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