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[ecrea] CFP: Media and Student Protest

Wed Jun 08 05:45:35 GMT 2016


*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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