Creating crises: how the university shapes student activism

This research investigates how the institutional structure of the university shapes student activism making use of militant ethnography. The main purpose is to provide a deeper and more complex understanding of student activism. The conducted fieldwork focussed on the tactics and strategies used in student activism. This is done via a framework that looks if a activists engage in a strategy of organising, mobilising and advocacy and if their tactics are best characterised as production struggles or circulation struggles. The main findings were the difficulty of employing an organising strategy and how collective actions at the university blurs the lines of production and circulation struggles. The fieldwork has been conducted in Rotterdam, the Netherlands with a focus on a student union opposing education budget cuts and a pro-Palestine student group.