student activism essay

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Say it loud: the powerful voice of student activism

Larry Towell. Canada, London. June 7, 2020. Peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in response to the police killing of George Floyd… Photograph. © Larry Towell / Magnum Photos. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SAIF, Paris.

I UNDERSTAND THAT I WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND. HOWEVER, I STAND. 1

Students have been “standing” for centuries, and activism is at least as old as the modern western university. From Bologna in the Middle Ages through Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, student collectives effectively determined their fees. Currently, in a world moved by activism, student uprisings are on the rise. We’re in a groundswell of youth protest, a renaissance partly defined by social media. See #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #NeverAgain, #climatechange, and many more.

The fervor of today’s activism recalls the movements of the sixties, a socially transformative period epitomized by books with titles like Generation on Fire and The Shattering . Image collections across the JSTOR platform chronicle these years. Acts of solidarity and resistance to police brutality are documented in photographs: three young Black men linking arms, 1962; teenage girls detained in a prison following peaceful protest, 1963. “We Shall Overcome,” the unofficial anthem of the movement, expresses the protest of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) captured on a pin-back button.

The tsunami of youth resistance to the Vietnam War is crystallized in a single image by Marc Riboud from 1967. In it, a young woman urges peace by raising a chrysanthemum against the guns of the American National Guard. A period of civil unrest known as May 68 began in Paris during the spring of 1968 and spread throughout France. It was catalyzed by a student movement that involved hundreds of thousands of protesters, shown above in a triumphant street view by Bruno Barbey.

Student protests have continued to mobilize around vital issues over the decades. The anti-Apartheid movement and the divestment of American interests in South Africa, notably at universities across the United States, is represented in this image showing the forcible removal of a young woman from the Wellesley campus in October 1986. By 1988, student activism was at the root of the divestment of more than 150 universities. 2 In 1989, the pro-democracy movement in China swelled to hundreds of thousands of occupying students at Tiananmen Square. They protested for more than a month, until the military launched a deadly ambush. 3 F15 — February 15, 2003, “the day the world said no to war” — was marked by an unprecedented global demonstration against the Iraq War. Millions of marchers gathered in hundreds of cities, including London, where students displayed signs reading “Make tea not war.”

In 2011, the Arab Spring generated uprisings from Tunisia and Egypt, throughout the Middle East, to Northern Africa, prompting the overthrow of governments. A participant — Omar, who was 15 at the time — recalled, “Tahrir remains the purest moment of my life – the sense of security, unity, bond, brotherhood, sisterhood, the way people helped each other regardless of faith or politics. Everyone was on the same page for once, nothing else mattered.”  4 A photograph from Tahrir Square demonstrates the unity he describes, while a “Freedom” sticker commemorates the inspiration. Closer to home, in 2018, students took up the fight against gun violence. On March 24, one month after a gunman murdered 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a group of teenage survivors of the attack led millions of Americans across the country in a march against gun violence.

The art of protest, including signs, stickers, and fashion, strengthens the call for justice. Shepard Fairey’s distinctive graphics lend poetry to the movement against guns, while a handmade sign spells out a basic truth: “Race is not a crime.” A whimsical sticker (“Love is the protest!”) by street artist Art. Omato evokes the pervasive spirit of sixties counterculture.

History and exceptional individuals — Malala, Greta, and X González — teach us the power of student activism. As Tess Murphy, gun control advocate, said in the wake of the 2022 Uvalde school shooting at Robb Elementary, “But one thing I’m not is hopeless… When we fight, we win.”

Artstor collections

• Magnum Photos
• Panos Pictures
• Open: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture
• The Schlesinger History of Women in America Collection

Shared collections

• Street Art Graphics Digital Archive, St. Lawrence University
• Wheaton College (MA) Marion B. Gebbie Archives Image Collection
• Muhlenberg College: Protest Artifacts
• Wellesley College Archives Image Gallery
• Student Unrest at Salve Regina, 1969-1973
• Campus and Queens Activism of the 1960s
• Student Activism on Campus (a Reveal Digital collection)

The Renaissance of Student Activism

“ There has been a real powerful sense ... that the future they were promised has been taken away from them.”

Maybe the campus protests seemed rather isolated at first. Dissatisfaction with the administration. Outrage over bad decisions. A student altercation gone bad.

For example: The protest at Florida State University last fall, when students didn’t like the idea of having the Republican state politician John Thrasher as their school’s president and launched a campaign—#SlashThrasher—against his candidacy. Citing the lawmaker’s corporate ties, various groups staged demonstrations, including some who organized a march to the city center.

Or the protest at the University of Michigan in September, when, amid frustrations over their football team’s losses, students rallied at the home of the school’s president to demand that he fire the athletic director. They had more on their minds than lost points: The director had neglected to remove the team’s quarterback from a football game after he suffered a serious head injury that was later diagnosed as a concussion . (The Florida students’ protest failed to change minds at FSU, but Michigan’s athletic director was quickly sent packing.)

“I’m proud of our history. I’m not proud of Dave Brandon being a part of that history.” pic.twitter.com/JDLSWXM7YE — Ace Anbender (@AceAnbender) September 30, 2014

There was the confederate-flag fiasco at Bryn Mawr, which resulted in a mass demonstration by hundreds of students who, all dressed in black, called for an end to racism on the Pennsylvania campus. A week later, more than 350 students staged a similar protest further north, at New York’s Colgate University. That one—dubbed #CanYouHearUsNow—likewise aimed to to end bigotry among students and faculty; it was in part prompted by a series of racist Yik Yak posts .

Just as has been happening in communities at large, campus protests against racism and bigotry—along with related types of discrimination—have become commonplace. Students at the University of Chicago hosted a #LiabilityoftheMind social-media campaign last November to raise awareness about institutional intolerance. A “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” walkout was staged the same month by hundreds of Seattle high-schoolers . Roughly 600 Tufts students lay down in the middle of traffic in December for four and a half hours—the amount of time Michael Brown’s body was left in the street after behind shot. Students at numerous other colleges did the same.

Of course, there were other common themes, too. Early last fall, Emma Sulkowicz, then a student at Columbia, pledged to carry a mattress on campus daily to protest the school’s refusal to expel her alleged rapist. Soon, hundreds of her classmates joined her, as did those at 130 other college campuses nationwide, according to reports. Anti-rape demonstrations became a frequent occurrence as colleges across the country came under scrutiny for their handling of campus sexual-assault cases. There were walkouts and sit-ins, canceled speeches and banner campaigns . Last May, the U.S. Department of Education reported that it was investigating 55 colleges and universities for possible violations of Title IX. As of this January, the number had gone up to 94 .

Sulkowicz even carried her mattress—with the help of two classmates—across stage to get her diploma on Tuesday:

. @Sejal_Singh_ , @ZoeRidolfiStarr & 2 others helped Emma Sulkowicz carry her mattress across stage at #ccclassday2015 pic.twitter.com/pEOqQviD0N — Teo Armus (@teoarmus) May 19, 2015

These demonstrations were, and are, very far from isolated. “There’s a renaissance of political activism going on, and it exists on every major campus,” Harold Levy, a former chancellor of New York City’s public schools who now oversees the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, recently told me. Levy attributed this resurgence in part to the growing inequality in educational opportunity in the country, which has contributed to great tensions between institutions and the public they’re supposed to serve; even protests that don’t explicitly focus on this cause, he said, are byproducts of this friction.

It’s happening again—it’s like when we were here! It’s happening! Levy, 61, was quoting a recent remark made by a friend who’s a trustee at Cornell, Levy’s alma mater. “He’s in a position of authority now, and he didn’t know whether to celebrate it or to worry about it,” Levy said. “And of course the answer is both: You want kids to be politically active precisely because you want their engagement in the world, and you want to encourage them to be free thinkers.” But that activism also threatens the institutions’ control.

This resurgence in campus activism necessarily a new phenomenon. After all, The New York Times wrote about “ The New Student Activism ” back in 2012, attributing the trend to the Occupy Movement. But observers say the activism that’s since proliferated has a different feel, and this new chapter could trigger significant shifts in the way things are run.

At least 160 student protests took place in the U.S. over the course of the 2014 fall semester alone, according Angus Johnston, a history professor at the City University of New York who specializes in student activism. “There’s certainly something of a movement moment happening right now,” he said, pointing in part to the news media, which fuels activism by putting protests on the public’s radar. “The campus environment right now has, for the past couple of years, reminded me a lot of the early- to mid-60s moment, where there was a lot of stuff happening, a lot of energy—but also a tremendous amount of disillusionment and frustration with the way that things were going in the country as a whole and on the campuses themselves.” And this sentiment has been taking hold in other parts of the world, too: Thousands of students (and teachers) have been demonstrating in Chile this month in the name of education reform, including two students who were killed last week.

For younger generations, Johnston added, the “belief that you can change the world [hasn’t been] beaten out of you yet.”

Johnston runs a blog-ish website featuring a resource that’s oddly hard to find on the Internet today: a modern timeline of student protests, including color-coded maps illustrating the location and theme of these demonstrations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the map (which has yet to be updated with data from the spring semester) reveals that most of the recent student uprisings during the fall of 2014 focused on racism and police violence, all but a few of them in the eastern half of the country. Many of these demonstrations used hashtags to mobilize, some of which are still in use today. Meanwhile, according to Johnston’s analysis, about half of the 160 protests were evenly split between two main themes: sexism/sexual assault and university governance/student rights. The remainder called for improvements to tuition and funding—about half of them at University of California schools.

But they don’t always have to do with issues specific to students. Just take the divestment campaigns, which are becoming a popular form of political activism at college campuses across the country, including Harvard, Boston University, and Princeton. These efforts are aimed at convincing university administrations to drop their investments in controversial industries (such as guns or fossil fuels) or corporations (such as those that side with Israel) and have little to do with on-campus issues.

“A lot of the protests … embrace national issues through the lens of campus policies,” Johnston said. “The university is big enough to matter but small enough to have an influence on. It becomes a site of organizing because there are opportunities to organize on campus that a lot of times you don’t have in an off-campus community.”

Young Americans are often characterized as politically apathetic and ignorant . It’s true that they vote at exceptionally low rates , but some say that’s because they don’t believe going to the polls makes much of a difference. Perhaps they see activism as a more effective means of inciting change—particularly when the change they seek has little to do with politics. Just last week, the entire graduate class of 2016 at the University of Southern California’s art and design simply school dropped out of the program in protest of faculty and curriculum changes.

Entire Class Of USC MFA Art Students Dropped Out Over 'Unethical Treatment' http://t.co/wWlgfd1miS pic.twitter.com/h4uGskMh4Q — LAist (@LAist) May 16, 2015

Sometimes students demonstrate precisely because they don’t have political power . A group of Kentucky teens recently spent months campaigning for a state bill that would’ve given them the opportunity to have a say in the selection of district superintendents. The high-schoolers testified before lawmakers, wrote op-eds, consulted attorneys, and collected piles of research. The legislature didn’t pass the bill .

Indeed, despite the uptick in activism, those in power—from lawmakers to school administrators—don’t appear to be any more sympathetic student activists. Though graduate-student employees across the country have for years struggled to unionize in pursuit of tuition relief and better wages, for example, only a number of groups have succeeded in that effort.

Perhaps school officials are even less sympathetic now than in the past. According to Johnston, as Occupy spread, student activists were faced with increasingly violent punishment. One of the most egregious examples involved the University of California, Davis, in 2011, when a campus police officer, with the backing of his superiors, pepper-sprayed a group of seated students involved in an Occupy protest. Though that’s an extreme example, Johnson added, “we are seeing a less transparent, less responsive, less democratic university than we’ve seen in the past.”

Recently, a group of students at Tufts refused to eat for five days—more than 120 hours—in protest of the administration’s decision to lay off 20 janitors. For health and safety reasons, the students ended the hunger strike ended without arriving at a deal with the administration. But students have continued to rally, including at Sunday’s commencement:

. @MonacoAnthony speaks again and signs go back up pic.twitter.com/vlhUTNVcHy — Nick Pfosi (@npfosi) May 17, 2015

And earlier this semester, the University of California, Santa Cruz—a school founded during the civil-rights movement that still markets itself as a mecca of radical politics—delivered one-and-a-half year suspensions to a group of students who blocked a major highway in protest of tuition hikes . (The students each face sentences of 30 days in jail and restitution, too.) Critics accused the school of capitulating to community members, who were furious over the gridlock caused by the protesters. Undergraduate tuition at UC schools has more than doubled in the last decade to its current level of $12,192—increasing at an even higher rate than has the national average.

“There has been a real powerful sense among a lot of student activists that the future they were promised has been taken away from them,” Johnston said. “One of the thing that ties (the campus movements) all together is a sense that the future doesn’t look as rosy as it might have a few years ago.”

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Protests at Rutgers University

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Last month’s Women’s March, one of the largest demonstrations in American history, drew between three and five million people across 673 U.S. cities and 170 cities internationally, according to a Google Drive effort to capture estimates. Since then, protests have continued in communities nationwide, including a series of major demonstrations in response to President Trump’s executive order barring travel to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim nations, his order to move ahead with the wall along the Mexican border and the controversial North Dakota pipeline .

Viewed as signaling white nationalism, racism, sexism and xenophobia, the election of Donald Trump has provoked strong and negative responses among students. The turbulent political atmosphere recently engulfed the University of California, Berkeley , where students or -- according to campus officials -- agitators from off the campus violently interrupted what were to be peaceful protests and a speech by Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos. Student protests against Trump’s travel ban have also occurred at Ohio, American, Chapman and Rutgers Universities .

What do these events say, if anything, about activism on college campuses today? Have they sparked a new wave of student engagement? Or is it a momentary outcry?

If the former, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that students led the charge against the agendas and decisions of our nation’s policy makers. Since our country’s founding, college students have challenged the status quo and played a key role in movements for social change. Historian David F. Allmendinger Jr. reported that between 1760 and 1860, New England colleges experienced “the most disorderly century in their history.” Quickly spreading to colleges in the South and Midwest, student “disquietude” (also called mobs, uprisings, riots, unrest, resistance, lawlessness, disorder and terrorism ) challenged everything from slavery to the quality of the butter in the dining hall.

The next significant wave of student activism came during the Depression, when students challenged capitalism and wealth inequality in the 1930s and favored socialism, labor unions and public work programs. Snuffed by the McCarthy era and dubbed a “ forgotten history ,” student unrest faded until the late 1950s and ’60s, when anti-war sentiments and civil rights movements galvanized students. College activists successfully sought the closure of ROTC programs and catalyzed the establishment of interdisciplinary programs such as African-American and ethnic studies. Student protest also led to the ratification of the 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. In the 1970s, female students challenged sexism on campuses and throughout American society.

Student activism sporadically reoccurred until the 2000s, when, according to University of Illinois Professor Barbara Ransby , students shaped “the conscience of the university” by raising awareness about racial inequality, sexual assault on campus, immigrant rights, homophobia and unequal rights for the LGBTQ community, as well as global issues such as the Palestinian crisis. And in recent years, students on campuses throughout the country have supported the Black Lives Matter movement and protested over racism in various forms.

Leveraging the Moment

So where are we today? Online activism has surged. In the weeks following the election, many virtual resources and communities of practice were created by people working together, sometimes anonymously, on distinct causes. Some of these come from colleges and universities (although, for most, the originator is hard to identify). Examples include Post-Election Support Resources (Stanford University) and Election Clapback Actions (CUNY). An assistant professor at Merrimack College, Melissa Zimdars, created a resource for spotting fake news . Recent data suggest that digital platforms empower students and facilitate civic and political engagement. According to a recent Educause study , around 96 percent of college students own smartphones. This enables communication and organizing capacity.

Colleges and universities will undoubtedly face more student unrest. How can educators leverage this historic opportunity and encourage constructive, inclusive political learning and participation? We offer some suggestions.

• Approach student activism with the right attitude. Student protest is not a bad thing, unless it is accompanied by violence or seriously disrupts the educational process. Student protest provides a teachable moment not just for those who are protesting but for the rest of the campus community. Consider it a timely opportunity for problem-based learning .
• Provide students with opportunities to gather, identify the issues that concern them the most and identify their networks. This includes providing students with physical spaces to convene and connecting them with faculty members or people in the community who share their interest.
• Teach the arts of discussion. Your institution already has experienced facilitators among faculty members, administrators and students. Have them teach others to facilitate and engage in constructive discussions as a foundation to organizing. Many civic organizations provide training (see the resources section of this publication ).
• Study, deliberate, study: don’t let students go down some rabbit hole of alternative facts or myopic analysis. Insist that students answer questions, like what do we know about this issue? Is what we know reliable? How will we fill knowledge gaps? And most importantly, what are all of the perspectives on this issue, including unpopular ones unrepresented in this group? Weigh the pros and cons of different perspectives rather than dismissing them without consideration or, worse, denigrating the people who hold them.
• Help students think positively by envisioning “the mission accomplished.” What will the world look like if their goals are achieved? The process of identifying a shared vision among group members is in and of itself a good lesson in framing, persuasion, collaboration and compromise.
• Teach the history and most promising practices of social change movements. There are thousands of well-researched publications to consider as text. We offer two very different resources: Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King and Southern Christian Leadership Conference by David Garrow offers 500-plus pages of insight into the meticulous, long-game planning, as well as the strategies used to overcome unthinkable barriers, by leaders of the African-American civil rights movement. In her research for the Ford Foundation , Hahrie Han, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, outlines essential strategies, such as coalition building among civic organizations, political leaders and other potential allies.
• Emphasize the importance of voting and what’s at stake when candidates have vastly different policy positions. Our National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement found that only 45 percent of college and university students voted in 2012 . And while we haven't analyzed all the final numbers for 2016 yet, as the election demonstrated, who turns out to vote matters.

Finally, college and university presidents have historically been hesitant to offer their viewpoints on political issues, but recent events, particularly on the issue of immigration and new border controls, have given rise to a series of powerful statements from presidents and higher education leaders . We wonder what would happen if presidents who plan to make public statements about matters of public policy were to involve students in the discussion about that statement to take advantage of the educational moment.

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College Student Activism, or How to "Disguise Subversive Action like a Sugar-Coated Pill" (October 2017): Activism in the 21st Century

• Pre-20th Century Activism
• The 1920s and 1930s
• Early 1960s
• Social Upheaval, the New Left, and the Vietnam Anti-War Movement
• The 1980s and 1990s

Activism in the 21st Century

• Historical Surveys

Works Cited

The issues that motivated students to stage sit-ins, hold rallies, and advocate for change during the 1990s carried over into the twenty-first century, although activists’ strategies began to be transformed by the use of new communication technologies. Although not exclusively student-led, the Occupy Movement, Black Lives Matter, and protest movements supporting the rights of immigrants and the LGBTQ community engaged large numbers of college students energized by the disparities wrought by growing income inequality throughout society and the enduring problems of racism, marriage inequality, and immigration reform. Policing the Campus: Academic Repression, Surveillance, and the Occupy Movement , edited by Anthony J. Nocella II and David Gabbard, offers essays written by activists who place struggles over the growing corporatization of higher education and the repression of free expression within the context of the broader Occupy Movement. Another important collected work, also by Nocella and coeditor Erik Juergensmeyer, is Fighting Academic Repression and Neoliberal Education: Resistance, Reclaiming, Organizing, and Black Lives Matter in Education . Not all of the contributors focus on student activism, but they provide a good overview of the state of radical African American activism within academe. Similarly, Randy Shaw’s second edition of The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century does not exclusively examine activism on campus, but the author does provide tactical guidance to student groups pressing for social change. Student Activism as a Vehicle for Change on College Campuses: Emerging Research and Opportunities , by Michael Miller and David Tolliver, uses case studies—the racially charged protests at the University of Missouri, the protest over contract negotiations at City University of New York, the fight over curriculum reform at Seattle University, and the student rallies against tuition hikes at the University of California—as lessons learned about contemporary student activism. The authors pay particular attention to protesters’ reliance on technology and campus leaders’ responses to student activism, addressing protest as a positive challenge rather than simply a problem to be solved. They succeed in placing the future of activist engagement by students entering college after the Millennial generation within the context of their life experiences.

The relatively sparse monographic literature about college student activism in the twenty-first century does not reflect any real lack of engagement, however. Beginning in the mid-1990s, there has been a resurgence in citizenship education whereby those in higher education attempt to take some degree of ownership over students’ natural desire to challenge the status quo, thus channeling their engagement prosocially while perhaps—not coincidently—gaining some control over the unpredictable dynamics of activism.  One can witness educational opportunities taking the form of service learning, volunteerism, and such university-sponsored initiatives as alternative spring breaks for local community or overseas-based summer service projects. Although educating future citizens to function productively in a democratic society has always been a key mission of higher education, colleges and universities appear to be normalizing students’ desires for social change around institutionally supported forms of teachable moments and learning opportunities. The literature on service learning and citizenship education in higher education is voluminous. Some examples that reflect the intersection of civic engagement and activism include the recent work edited by Krista M. Soria and Tania D. Mitchell, Civic Engagement and Community Service at Research Universities: Engaging Undergraduates for Social Justice, Social Change and Responsible Citizenship . The book is intended to inform campus administrators about how to build and manage citizenship programs and initiatives, and contributors document the ways in which research universities can encourage student involvement in civic and community projects within an increasingly interconnected world. An important work published earlier, edited by Carolyn R. O’Grady, is Integrating Service Learning and Multicultural Education in Colleges and Universities . Its essays describe the theoretical constructs behind the incorporation of multicultural principles into service-learning programs and offer examples of community programs that schools can develop to promote social change. Susan J. Deeley’s Critical Perspectives on Service-Learning in Higher Education focuses on describing the theory and praxis of critical pedagogies, service learning, and reflective writing as ways to enhance empathy and build community. Also of note is Higher Education and Democracy: Essays on Service-Learning and Civic Engagement , edited by John Saltmarsh and Edward Zlotkowski. This work brings together twenty-two essays in which the authors examine the historical roots of the service-learning movement and demonstrate the need for action in developing curricula that support higher education’s civic mission.

With exception of Miller and Tolliver’s 2017 work, comprehensive monographic studies have yet to emerge that examine college student activism in the second decade of the twenty-first century within the context of today’s hyperpartisan political environment. The activism of students on today’s college campuses parallels in some ways the student protests of the 1960s, when students were engaged in a broad spectrum of social justice causes and made significant contributions to much larger protest movements throughout society. This is especially the case if one interprets volunteerism, community service, and service learning to be an applied form of college student activism—different, but not necessarily separate from the more recognizable, direct acts of protest that continue to occur. A directory of current student campaigns and activist groups can be found at CampusActivism.org , an open-access interactive website for progressive activists seeking information about starting a campaign, sharing resources, publicizing events, and building networks.

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How Student Activism Could Potentially Impact American Politics

NPR's Sarah McCammon speaks with Nancy Thomas, director of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts University about the potential impact of student activism in American politics.

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The Ethics of Radical Student Activism: Social Justice, Democracy and Engagement Across Difference

• Open Access
• First Online: 08 November 2022

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This article focuses on student activism as an important site for the formulation and exploration of ethical dilemmas intrinsic to activist engagement across difference. In recent years, there has been a marked upsurge in student mobilization against inequality and social injustice within universities and in wider society. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork material generated with left-wing student activists in New Zealand in 2012 and 2015, the article investigates how two different student activist networks, in their struggles for equality and justice, navigate ethical dilemmas around inclusion and exclusion and balance universal moral claims against a sensitivity to situated ethical complexities and locally embedded experiences and values. While sharing the goal of fighting inequality, the two networks differ in their emphasis on the creation of ‘dissensus’ and ‘safe spaces’ in their network, their university and in wider society. The article draws upon two interconnected strands of theories, namely, debates about deliberative democracy, including questions of universal accessibility and inclusion/exclusion, and theories around ethics as a question of living up to universal moral imperatives (deontology) or as embedded in everyday negotiations and cultivations of virtues (virtue ethics). Inspired by Mansbridge, it proposes that central to radical student activism as an ethical practice is the ability to act as a (subaltern) counter public that not only ‘nags’ or haunts dominant moralities from the margins but also allows for the cultivation of spaces and identities within the activist networks that can ‘nag’ or haunt the networks’ own moral frames and virtues and goad them into action and new democratic experiments.

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• Student activism
• Virtue ethics
• Free spaces
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Introduction

Moral concerns and claims play a central role in student activism to promote economic and social justice. For decades, students in many countries have protested rising tuition fees and cuts to state subsidies, while recent years have seen a marked upsurge in student mobilization against the systematic marginalization or discrimination of certain bodies and voices within higher education and in wider society. Students not only target specific institutional policies and practices but also challenge dominant moral orders for appropriate and desirable conduct, including what constitutes unethical and unacceptable forms of speech—in relation to teaching and learning activities, as well as to the academic and societal debate culture.

These movements have given rise to experiments in democratic forms of organizing, as well as discussions about (im)proper public debate and democratic deliberation. Some activists, for example, have endorsed an ideal of the university, and society more generally, as a ‘safe space’, that is, a place free from harassment and oppression where participants can feel safe, seen and heard. They request the use of ‘trigger warnings’ in the classroom and engage in ‘no-platforming’ actions, where student activists prevent individuals whose messages they perceive to be offensive or threatening from speaking at public events on campus.

These student activists argue that their actions to increase social justice allow hitherto marginalized and silenced groups to gain a voice and thereby strengthen the possibility for dialogue across difference, which is vital for democracy and critical academic thinking (cf. Ben-Porath, 2017 ). Critics, by contrast, have maintained that activists’ use of the moral criteria of social justice and diversity to privilege certain kinds of bodies, speech and knowledge over others presents a fundamental threat to core Western values of free speech and democratic deliberation (George & West, 2017 ; Mason 2016 ; Slater, 2016 ) and risks leading the wider (student) population into increasingly fractious identity politics (cf. Zheng, 2017 ).

In the Global North, student activism to dismantle economic and social injustice has intersected and overlapped with wider social movements including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, which, in different ways, are centred on moral concerns regarding how to create more just and equal societies. In student activism, as in these wider social movements, personal testimony and experience play a central role in the moral shaping of social and political ambitions, visions and conversations—but also in the frictions emerging within and between left-wing student activist networks.

This article focuses on student activism as a site for the formulation and exploration of ethical dilemmas around how to engage with others across difference. By connecting theoretical discussions of deliberative democracy with the question of ethics in activism, the article investigates how two left-wing student activist groups at the University of Auckland, in different ways, balance inclusion against exclusion, and universal moral claims against sensitivity to situated ethical complexities and locally embedded experiences and values. Communicative procedures and ideals in these groups’ activist ‘free spaces’, differences in personal experiences of marginality, and the cultivation of activist virtues through the labour of organizing and collaborating across difference mediate and shape the student activists’ ethical engagement. With inspiration from Mansbridge ( 1996 ), the article proposes that radical student activism as an ethical practice revolves around the ability to act as certain kinds of (subaltern) counter publics, namely, counter publics that not only ‘nag’ or haunt dominant moralities from the margins, but also allow for the continuous cultivation of internal spaces and identities that can ‘nag’ their own moral frames and virtues, goading them into action and to conduct important democratic experiments.

Deliberation, Counter Publics and Free Spaces: Ethical Dilemmas

In my analysis of the ethnographic material from New Zealand, I draw upon two interconnected strands of theories: theories and debates concerning deliberative democracy, including questions of universal accessibility and inclusion/exclusion, and theories exploring ethics as a question of living up to universal moral imperatives (deontology) or as embedded in everyday negotiations and cultivations of virtues (virtue ethics). Accordingly, my discussion of the role of ethics in student activism is centred on the ethical paradoxes related to processes of deliberation within and across different forms of counter publics and free spaces.

The question of whether contemporary pro-equality student activism endangers or enlarges the democratic space and public debate within the university and in wider society clearly resonates with the debates surrounding Habermas’ model of free deliberative democracy that first emerged in the 1990s. In the following, I will therefore briefly outline some central theoretical positions in this debate and link them to methodological approaches to studying and understanding ethics.

In his historical-sociological analysis, Habermas ( 1989 ) argued that the newly established cafés and salons in eighteenth-century France, England and Germany provided the foundation for the emergence of a new form of bourgeois public sphere. Ideally, in this sphere, everyone could engage in unrestricted rational deliberation of topics of so-called common concern and conjure a ‘public opinion’ in society that could render the state accountable to the citizenry. The emergence of this new ‘public sphere’ was conditional on three interconnected ‘institutional criteria’ or ideas, namely, a disregard for status, the development of a domain of common concern and inclusivity in the sense that everyone had to be able to participate (Habermas, 1989 , pp. 36f). In principle, therefore, the public sphere was a sphere of rational and universalistic politics where everyone could engage in deliberation as part of one single community. As indicated above, similar ideals of a public sphere that enables everyone in a liberal democracy to freely engage and speak, no matter their status, opinions or background, are at the centre of the critique raised against student activism in pursuit of greater equality and social justice.

However, important feminist critique has been directed at Habermas’ deliberative model. The political scientist Iris M. Young ( 1996 ) has argued that the model’s reliance on a notion of universal reason and rational argumentation renders emotional or experiential expressions illegitimate and privileges styles of speaking that are dispassionate, disembodied and general. Such norms of rational deliberation, Young argues, not only create a problematic distinction between reason and emotion, mind and body; they are ‘culturally specific and often operate as forms of power that silence or devalue the speech of some people’ ( 1996 , p. 123). Accordingly, changes in the communicative and procedural norms for deliberation—for example, the introduction of certain forms of greeting or the inclusion of personal storytelling—can allow different kinds of bodies, arguments and styles of speech to appear, be heard and taken seriously.

In a similar vein, the feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser ( 1990 ) has argued that the ideal of a bourgeois public sphere, open to all, requires a momentary bracketing of social inequalities, which, instead of securing equal access and deliberation, can mask various forms of domination. The ideal of free and unrestricted deliberation was never realized in practice, with a number of marginalized groups, including women, de facto excluded from the conversation. The public sphere of the eighteenth-century cafés and salons was limited to upper-class male actors ‘who were coming to see themselves as a ‘universal class”, Fraser maintained (Fraser, 1990 , p. 60). She criticized Habermas for idealizing the public sphere and failing to recognize how excluded groups form (subaltern) counter publics, such as women-only voluntary associations. Rather than being bracketed in the public sphere, Fraser argued, inequalities should be thematized explicitly to draw attention to the ongoing contestations of what should be considered ‘public’ or ‘common concerns’.

For Fraser, counter publics become spaces of ‘withdrawal and regroupment’, as well as ‘bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics’ (Fraser, 1990 , p. 68). In this sense, the concept overlaps with the notion of ‘free spaces’ (Polletta, 1999 ; Evans & Boyte, 1986 ) in the literature on social movements. Free spaces are ‘small-scale settings within a community or movement that are removed from the direct control of dominant groups, are voluntarily participated in, and generate the cultural challenge that precedes or accompanies political mobilization’ (Polletta, 1999 , p. 1). Allowing marginalized people to develop a voice and a vision, Evans and Boyte ( 1986 ) argue that such spaces are central to democracy:

Put simply, free spaces are settings between private lives and large-scale institutions where ordinary citizens can act with dignity, independence, and vision. (…) Democratic action depends upon these free spaces, where people experience a schooling in citizenship and learn a vision of the common good in the course of struggling for change (Evans & Boyte, 1986 , p. 16–17).

Interestingly, some social movement scholars have called these spaces ‘safe spaces’ (see, e.g. Polletta, 1999 ), and as we shall see later, contemporary ‘free spaces’ in student activist networks sometimes explicitly connect to the quest to make higher education and wider society ‘safe(r) spaces’. The dual dimension of counter publics and free/safe spaces of withdrawal and engagement in wider public activities is not without challenges. As Jane Mansbridge puts it ( 1996 : 58), the dilemma is that ‘the enclaves, which produce insights that less protected spaces would have prevented, also protect those insights from reasonable criticism’. In other words, on the one hand, free/safe spaces appear to be necessary in order for counter publics to emerge and formulate common concerns and visions. On the other hand, they risk closing in on themselves, developing a language not heard or understood by others and failing to engage in conversation across difference.

This, I argue, is fundamentally an ethical dilemma. It not only revolves around ideals for a well-functioning democracy but also relates to theoretical discussions about how to understand and promote ethical conduct. In social theory, there are at least two central approaches to such questions of morality and ethics. Durkheimian researchers understand ethics and morality as external normative constraints on behaviour. More recently, a growing number of scholars have, by contrast, explored the ethical and the moral as emerging in situated practices, unconscious habits and reflective deliberations and, as such, strongly tied to the cultivation of virtues and personal character (see, e.g. Boltanski & Thevenot, 2000 ; Fassin, 2012 , 2015 ; Klenk, 2019 ; Mattingly & Throop, 2018 ).

This difference, focusing on ethical conduct as either a question of living up to normative rules and moral imperatives or as emerging in the situated negotiation and cultivation of virtues, resonates with the distinction between deontological/duty ethics (with Kant as a main protagonist) and virtue ethics (developed from Aristotle, among others) in moral philosophy. While the former emphasizes ethics as a question of doing one’s duty and living up to a moral absolute, the latter focuses on the kinds of desirable virtues and characteristics that a moral/virtuous person possesses. In the former, ethics are about obeying universal moral laws, discerned through reason and thereafter translated into practice. In the latter, ethics are cultivated and embedded in local practice and therefore contingent on the community in which they are generated and practiced. Ethics hereby become ‘the subjective work produced by agents to conduct themselves in accordance with their inquiry about what a good life is’ (Fassin, 2012 : 7).

The ideal of the bourgeois public sphere is built on a universal moral claim, discerned through ‘reason’, in which citizens are to live up to normative ideals of free, rational and inclusive participation in the public sphere. By contrast, the above-mentioned feminist critiques of this kind of universal politics seem to resonate with traditions of virtue ethics that understand ethics as embedded in everyday negotiations and contingent on the particular community involved.

In an analysis of the role of ethics in specific student activists’ lives and actions, the two approaches to ethics—and the contrasting views of deliberative democracy—are useful as analytical heuristics to tease out how various forms of ethical and moral claims and practices intersect influence and shape student activist spaces. Understood as ethical work, radical student activism is about both contentious politics based on universalizing moral claims of social justice and the cultivation of collective and individual subjectivities and sensibilities, including a moral responsibility to act, that are embedded in particular forms of organizing, styles of speech and reflective deliberations.

In the sections below, I use the theoretical debates surrounding deliberative democracy and ethics to analyse empirical case material from New Zealand. I pay attention to the ways that universalizing moral claims are balanced and negotiated with a sensitivity towards diversity and plurality. Furthermore, I examine the different ways that activists negotiate and enact the connections between knowledge, action and virtue in order to create a better world. First, however, I will briefly introduce the fieldwork that forms the basis for the analysis.

Fieldwork with Student Activists in Auckland

In 2012, I conducted 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork with left-wing student activists at the University of Auckland who had been mobilizing against budget cutbacks and tuition fee increases, among other things. Over the past year, they had mobilized hundreds of students at various rallies and protest occupations. They had edited the student magazine and developed a number of workshops (on topics including facilitating meetings, the legal issues related to their activism and how best to deal with the media). They held regular meetings where they discussed and planned actions, had debriefings after actions and continuously set up reading groups reflecting different activist interests and needs.

As I will elaborate later, they worked from an ideal of ‘dissensus’ and the creation of plural but equal spaces for conversation. They experimented with organic, non-hierarchical forms of meetings and continuously discussed to what extent they should present themselves as a group/unity with a specific name in order to better mobilize others and be recognizable, or whether to refuse this stabilization and categorization in favour of more diffuse, organic and fluid identities (see Nielsen 2019 ). In order to explore their political aims and ways of organizing, I participated in different protest actions (including a ‘street party’ and protests against fee hikes), followed their writings in the student magazine and on their Facebook page, conducted formal interviews with seven students who were involved in the actions (from organizers to more ad hoc activists) and had informal conversations with them and other activists and scholars at various academic and social events.

In 2015, I returned for a shorter 3-week stay. I reinterviewed three of the activists from 2012, who were still involved in student activism. They told me that a new group of activists, primarily from a queer background, had become visible on campus. I interviewed three students who were actively involved in this queer activist network. Whereas in 2012, the activist group strived to create spaces for the cultivation of dissensus , the queer activists worked from an ideal of turning their meetings, the university and wider society into safe(r) spaces . Among other things, they had pushed for gender-neutral toilets at the university and introduced pronoun rounds at meetings. They ran a reading group on queer literature and theory, were active in different debates on social media but were not involved in as many public actions as the students in 2012. As one of them said, there was not the same ‘political momentum for protests’ now as previously, where protests around tuition fees and the budget had mobilized hundreds of students. In this article, for the sake of clarity, I will refer to activists who were involved in 2012 (and in some cases were still active in 2015) as the older activists, and students engaged in the queer activist network as the newer student activists. To ensure anonymity, all names of student activists have been changed.

‘Framing’ a Common Moral Problem? Radicality, Solidarity and Deliberation

In my interviews with both older and newer student activists in 2012 and 2015, they all, in different ways, conjured a wider moral frame revolving around economic inequality and social injustice through which they understood their own situation, specific actions and the general problems or afflictions in society. As Yasmin, a student activist whom I interviewed in both 2012 and 2015 explained, ‘to me it’s the question of inequality; that’s what ties it all together’.

Many of the student activists I talked to in 2012 and 2015, including Yasmin, were involved in activist networks both on campus, focusing on university-related issues, and off campus, such as anti-gentrification activism or broader anti-capitalist, socialist movements. Therefore, in their framing – that is, the ‘active, process-driven, contestation-ridden reality construction’ (Snow & Benford, 1992 : 136) that organizes experience and guides action in a social movement – they attempted to articulate and connect various struggles and experiences in a meaningful and unified way. The shared moral framework revolving around economic inequality and social injustice made solidarity and interconnections between different struggles a central issue for the core group of student activists I talked to in 2012. As Nina, who was active in both 2012 and 2015, said:

Once you’ve done a lot of practical organizing, you just realize that we’re all talking about the same problem. I mean, different iterations (…) We need to focus on the connections between different issues. People call it intersectionality (…) you can’t really separate patriarchy from capitalism from racism from colonialism (…) Working out how to have solidarity with groups that you’re not necessarily that central to, but you, like, entirely support, is really one of the most important things (Nina, student activist, 2015).

For Nina, solidarity as an ethical engagement became a question of extending the student activist framework to incorporate values and fights that were not initially at the centre of their struggle. Solidarity, as she put it, is about:

Fighting one’s own fight and fighting alongside others in their fight, which at a more general level is also your fight (Nina, student activist, 2015).

A given fight for equality, in this sense, is not merely to be understood as belonging to a specific interest group. It is both universal and particular—belonging to everyone, yet a greater focus for certain groups who, for example, have personal experiences with that specific form of inequality. Therefore, it is not simply a question of engaging as if it was your own struggle, but of realizing that, on a more profound moral level, it is your struggle—namely, a common and universal struggle against inequality, discrimination and oppression.

In light of the discussion around ideals of free deliberation in the public sphere, the students’ quest for solidarity can be understood as an attempt to turn concerns that are otherwise deemed particular, subjective or private into common or public moral concerns (cf. Fraser, 1990 ). However, solidarity work and the conjuring up of a common moral absolute are both challenging and potentially risky. As Yasmin formulated it, the ideals of solidarity are not always compatible with a desire to be radical:

There’s always tension in activism between solidarity, where you work across different groups without being exclusive, but also without compromising a stance of, like, radicality. (…) it’s a tension between, like, being radical and exclusive or being inclusive and potentially, like, ending up being absorbed. If you’re trying to be like completely inclusive, then you end up becoming part of the mechanisms that you’re trying to oppose (Yasmin, student activist, 2015).

The continuous balancing between radicality and solidarity, described by Yasmin, can be understood in terms of what Barnett ( 2004 ) has referred to as a constant negotiation in activism between an urgent sense of a ‘responsibility to act’ and a more patient sense of a ‘responsibility to otherness’. Whereas the former can be understood as an ethical call to act here and now to change the world, the latter urges caution and a sensitivity for and engagement with people and viewpoints that are different from one’s own. The sense of an urgent need to do and to act seems conditional on a political standpoint characterized by unity/common identity. By contrast, the patient sense of a responsibility to otherness combines features of learning and knowledge production across difference and a stretching of one’s ‘self’ (as an individual and/or group) to accommodate an otherness that opens up for alternative values and viewpoints, as well as for solidary engagement. Based on a clear identity and standpoint, the first form of moral responsibility can be exclusive, whereas the second strives towards greater inclusivity and comes with the risk of diluting the focus, identity and framing of the struggle—and ultimately being absorbed into and thereby reinforcing the mainstream political system that one sought to change.

As noted, the two student activist networks with whom I engaged in 2012 and 2015 had a shared moral frame of fighting social and economic injustice and promoting the emancipation of marginalized people. However, they emphasized slightly different ethical virtues and values, in terms of the balance between inclusivity and exclusivity, unity and difference, and solidarity and radicality. As we shall see in the following, student activism can generate powerful counter publics, but the degree to which the activists speak from and emphasize a subaltern positionality varies greatly.

Balancing Dissensus and Safety: A Sense of Kaupapa

The student activist networks in 2012 and 2015 continuously balanced and negotiated the degree to which they included and excluded other activist groups, as well as the broader student body. Tellingly, the older and the newer student activists evoked different organizational metaphors, signalling their different positions in society and at university. Their ‘free spaces’, accordingly, served slightly different purposes.

In 2012, the group of activist students were inspired by, among others, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s notion of ‘dissensus’ (see, e.g. Rancière, 2010 ). As Jim explained:

We are working from the ideal of dissensus, understood as the possibility for diversity and the constant challenging of established hierarchies. We aim to create a dissent academia (Jim, student activist, 2012).

Inspired by Occupy Wall Street and similar movements, these student activists worked with the ideal of a non-hierarchical, organic and horizontal structure, with no leaders. In order to create more inclusive, diverse and socially just meeting spaces, they also experimented with progressive stacking and having older activists sit with newcomers, helping them to engage and explaining what was going on. They encouraged all interested parties to participate in their meetings and hoped for greater diversity in their group. Jim and the other core activists were mainly white (upper-) middle-class students, and many of them studied social science subjects.

Even though they continuously worked and hoped to attract activist students from more diverse backgrounds, they did not succeed in earnest. Minority students, one of them said, often have other networks where they work with like-minded students and target specific minority-related issues. Nevertheless, Jim and his fellow activists seemed to feel a strong sense of ‘responsibility to otherness’ (Barnett, 2004 )—an obligation to learn more about other ways of viewing and experiencing the world, especially those of marginalized and minoritized others, in order to better include such positions in what they saw as a common struggle against inequality (see also Nielsen 2019 ). At one point during a big open activist meeting, a white male participant criticized progressive stacking for discrimination and censorship because he was asked by a female student of colour to stop talking and start listening a bit more. Jim and some of the other core student activists disagreed with the male activist and his critique of progressive stacking. After the meeting, they decided to set up a reading group on gender and postcolonial theory to learn more about what it means to engage from a marginalized position (which was not their own position and experience as such). Thereby, they hoped to qualify their efforts to counter what they felt were problematic forms of race and gender discrimination within the activist network.

As mentioned, when I returned to Auckland in 2015, a new group of students had become central within the activist environment on campus. In contrast to the older students, this new network emerged around experiences of marginalization. One of the newer activists, Simon, explained that these activists:

Tend to be from a queer background, so very much identity politics background, but still have the same sense of politics of kind of emancipatory politics [as the older activists] (Simon, student activist, 2015).

Whereas in 2012, the student activists worked from an ideal of dissensus , Simon talked about safe spaces and explained that they organized their meetings in ways that reduced the threat of violence:

We do a pronoun round at meetings. It’s basically a recognition of the fact that we want to make this world a … safe space (…) say if I called a drag trans-woman, like, he or him, it could make them feel incredibly unsafe, because there is that threat of violence, so basically making it a safe space (Simon, student activist, 2015).

The ‘threat of violence’, here, is both physical and verbal. These newer activists shared personal experiences with discrimination, read relevant literature and discussed how to make the university and wider society more inclusive and just. As explained by Mark, another student activist, who did not identify as queer himself, but who was part of this new network of student activists, ‘the pronoun round is about creating a more inclusive environment for organizing political action’. In this way, the meetings also helped to create a safe (free) space in the sense found in social movement theories.

The notion of ‘safe space’ first became prominent with the emergence of women’s and gay and lesbian movements in the 1960s and 1970s. It points to the necessity for the members of marginalized groups of obtaining a ‘room of one’s own’ (cf. Woolf, 1929 ) where one can confidently find one’s own voice and engage in wider public debate and potentially plan social or political events with the aim of improving one’s life as a minority. However, in recent years, the notion of safe spaces has proliferated to such an extent that it has been described as an ‘overused but undertheorized metaphor’ (Barrett, 2010 : 1).

In addition to referring to an activist space in a movement or a dedicated physical place allocated to a group of minority students, the term ‘safe space’ is now also used as a teaching and learning metaphor to address appropriate communication and interaction in the classroom and on campus in a more general sense. Footnote 1 This proliferation testifies to the emergence of a stronger counter public around questions of equality in public spaces as well as in teaching and learning. In the USA, for example, a growing number of students are now sympathetic to the concerns raised by minorities and recognize them as ‘public’ or ‘common’ rather than merely ‘private’ or ‘particular’ concerns (see, e.g. Palfrey, 2017 , Ben-Porath, 2017 ).

The queer students’ arguments for introducing pronoun rounds and their more general efforts to create a safe space resonate with the critique of Habermas’ model of deliberative democracy raised by the political scientist Iris M. Young ( 1996 ). As mentioned, Young argues that the emphasis on universal reason and rational argumentation in Habermas’ model privileges culturally specific styles of speaking that appear ‘objective’ because they are dispassionate, disembodied and general. When the newer activist students introduce pronoun rounds, share personal experiences and advocate for safe spaces, they engage in activities that Young argues can open up the space of public deliberation. The use of certain kinds of greetings or the inclusion of personal storytelling can allow hitherto marginalized bodies, arguments and styles of speech to appear and be heard (ibid).

However, the ideal of safe spaces and the introduction of pronoun rounds also involve certain forms of exclusion. In these spaces, as Mark explained, they deal with sensitive topics and people, so there is always a concern as to whether or not they will be welcoming of people with diverse backgrounds:

There’s an air of suspicion, and it’s something that we need to work on—how do you verify that someone’s not going to be, you know, prejudiced or bigoted towards anyone else that’s already in the group helping out. You don’t want someone who’s racist kind of coming in and, you know, dismantling some of the group there or causing a ruckus, or an issue (Mark, student activist, 2015).

Whereas most of the older student activists were not from a minority background in terms of race or sexuality, the newer queer group clearly spoke from a position of marginalization. In order to create a space for conversation that is free of discrimination and harassment, they felt they had to be somewhat exclusive and, on occasion, establish separatist spaces. Nevertheless, they also wanted to be inclusive and to engage with other groups. When I asked Simon if he knew about the older activists’ ideal of ‘dissensus’, he nodded and said:

I think that still happens—like this [the pronouns] is just a prerequisite . In order for this [dissensus] to happen, we need firstly, these are the ground rules and then I think that that [dissensus] happens anyway (Simon, student activist, 2015).

In order to create a genuinely inclusive and diverse environment where difference is acknowledged without reproducing existing hierarchies of people or knowledges, Simon argues that there is a need to set some new ground rules for how to engage with each other. Put differently, a certain ethics of conduct or virtue ethics needs to be developed. Simon used the Maori word ‘kaupapa’ to describe it:

Kaupapa (is) a general sense or purpose behind a movement or behind a group. Or like even just ground rules. And so, even in a situation of dissensus, I think there’s still a kaupapa where certain things are acceptable. It’s not acceptable to say racist things, you know. Sometimes it [kaupapa] is not said out loud, but you know there’s a sense of it (Simon, student activist, 2015).

Kaupapa can be more or less explicit, but, in any group, there will always be some kind of kaupapa—a sense of purpose guiding their activities—enabling it to function, Simon argued. The sense of purpose that guided the queer group seemed to revolve around an understanding of ethical conduct as a question of emancipation. Simon described how he really liked the queer reading group he was part of at the university.

There’s a good sense of kaupapa. I like that word. A good sense of how to treat each other. Not speaking over each other, letting each other talk. It’s a very good flow. Very, like, emancipatory space.

Kaupapa connects virtue ethics with a sense of purpose and collective aspiration. Due to the kaupapa, in this case the establishment of a safe space, the participants experience a sense of emancipation, of being recognized as equal and being free from the control of dominant groups or what they experience as dominant norms and values that they do not adhere to or live up to. And it is because of the safe space kaupapa that they are able to cultivate dissensus, but a dissensus within a certain frame and with people who agree on fundamental moral values, codes of conduct and styles of speech. The question, therefore, is to what extent such values and styles of speech also enable them to engage with activist groups beyond their own. Here, their mode of organizing and differences in their practical experiences when organizing with other groups also seemed to play an important role.

A Virtue Ethics of Labour: Cultivation of Sensibilities Within the Everyday

At one point in 2015, friction emerged between some of the newer queer activists and some of the older activists who had been active since 2011. Some of the newer activists accused some of the older male activists of homophobia and anti-Semitism. The disagreement and accusations developed and blew up on Twitter, which the older activist Nina described as ‘a forum where you can flag off people without having to face them’. Yasmin, also an older activist, explained that the whole process had been:

Like making people out to be bad, and I mean there were some Twitter posts about the student movement (…) like a public shaming thing around particular people that had been involved for a while. It would probably have been resolved if it hadn’t happened over Twitter (Nina, student activist, 2015).

Twitter functioned as vehicle for conjuring up a public moral evaluation of specific people, judging them to be unethical or ‘bad people’ who discriminate against certain minorities. The older activists I talked to in 2015 felt that the friction was largely caused by a misunderstanding and the huge role Twitter and other social media played for the newer activists. Penny described it as being ‘interested in politics the Twitter way’ and argued that there is a huge difference between ‘just posting on Twitter as opposed to, like, actually like being involved in organizing, doing the hard labor of organizing’. She felt that the newer student activists were involved more as a ‘hobby’ and that there was no ‘discipline’. For the newer activists, she said, discipline had become an ‘ugly word’. The newer activists did not hold regular meetings and had no ongoing activities; they did not organize or think about politics more generally, she complained.

People are not interested in committing to the labor … people thought of themselves as political but not in the active, laboring way (Penny, student activist, 2015).

The cultivation of a ‘committed’ and ‘disciplined’ self, who is willing to and capable of doing the ‘hard labor of organizing’, was at the core of Penny’s activist virtue ethics. She also complained that, because the newer activists were not ‘committed to the labor’, there was a lack of skills and a lack of sensibility towards diversity in activism. They did not know how to make posters, talk to the media or organize a rally, and did not collaborate with other networks on the practical organization of actions. Comparing them to her own activist trajectory, she felt that the newer students were not ‘subjectivated’ into activism in the same way as she had been:

When I first got involved, I didn’t know anyone at all. So it was definitely not based on friendship, which I feel like somehow it seems to be transformed into this. (…) as opposed to how we used to be, where if, like, people came together and they, we would spend hours in meetings just like (…) trying to work through things, like, and it took time, and it took work and a lot of, a lot of, like, energy went into things. And I feel like people perhaps have transformed politics into just theory or, like, and a group identity as opposed to something that you really have to work at and actions (…) But now it’s like people are not organizing and activism is like something that you join. Not something that you get subjectivated into, I guess (Penny, student activist, 2015).

The development of a collective identity, common theoretical framing and friendship had also been important in Penny’s own activist trajectory, but it was not the starting point. Rather, it was something that gradually emerged in and through the practical activist labour. Through long conversations and the tedious work of organizing, they developed particular virtues, both in terms of practical skills and for engaging across difference. Activist virtue, in other words, became a question of hard work and the acquisition of skills (cf. Widlok, 2012 ).

Importantly, the changing ‘cycle of protest’ (Snow & Benford, 1992 ; Tarrow, 1998 ) also seemed to play a role. Yasmin said that the friction between the newer and older activists had emerged in what she called an ‘interim period between organizing’ and argued that in activist circles you often get more conflict and theoretical disagreements during such periods: ‘If you are organizing, like, this is an issue, deal with this, deal on the spot’, she said. Several of the older activists, like Yasmin, argued that a difference in age and experience with activism could also play a role:

… They’re very young students and I was talking to my friend who’s been involved in a lot of queer politics groups for a very long time. She was saying it does start off like when you organize around a particular, organize around identity, it very much starts off in that setting and it takes realizing that you actually have to organize with groups that might make you feel uncomfortable (…) it takes organizing with lots of groups of people to realize that sometimes you can’t always be in a safe space or can’t always be … your oppression can’t always be the center of it, I guess (Yasmin, student activist, 2015).

In a similar vein, Penny argued that when you engage in practical organizing with others:

You realize that you have to compromise. You can’t just tell people they’re problematic (…) the language and practices you’ve incorporated in your meeting structures isn’t as intuitive or necessary or appropriate in other spaces (Penny, student activist, 2015).

The focus on practical organizing and collaboration or solidary work with other groups who also promote greater equality seems to emphasize the kind of virtue ethics that the anthropologist Veena Das has described as ‘ordinary ethics’ (Das, 2012 ; Lambek, 2010 ). In ‘ordinary ethics’, Das says, the ethical

work is done not by orienting oneself to transcendental, objectively agreed upon value but rather through the cultivation of sensibilities within the everyday (…) Ethics and morality on the register of the ordinary are more like threads woven into the weave of life rather than notions that stand out and call attention to themselves through dramatic enactments and heroic struggles of good versus evil (Das, 2012 : 134).

One could argue that the practical organizing across difference, described by Penny and Yasmin, cultivates pragmatic sensibilities towards others—an ethical sense of ‘responsibility to otherness’ (Barnett, 2004 ), which locates ethics within everyday activities that constantly challenge the universal moral imperatives around which radical student activism also revolves. The kind of practical labour that activists engage in therefore also affects the balance between ‘radicality’ and ‘solidarity’, exclusion and inclusion and the particular versus the universal in politics.

Yasmin considered the causes the newer students were fighting for extremely important. However, she felt that they often lacked a more general structural and class-focused analysis and that they had little experience with or desire to organize actions with other groups. Therefore, she argued, they risked becoming too insular. So even though Yasmin, Nina and Penny were sympathetic to the newer students’ ambitions and causes, they felt that the ideal of ‘safe spaces’, when combined with a lack of ‘labor’, ‘discipline’ and practical organizing, was potentially problematic. Nina said that the safe space ideal sometimes, but certainly not always, led to what she felt was a ‘culture of inwardness’ and an overemphasis on personal experience.

Yeah, I think it may be a tendency in certain groups that focus on identity politics to focus, kind of, to really emphasize individual subjectivity. And also that’s in the, in the service of affirmation of an identity, but [a] marginalized [one], and so it’s really important, but I guess it can slip into a kind of almost neoliberal kind of motive of complaint where, you know, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion and their own grievances. You can’t really critique one another because if you are, you’re, like, disrupting the safe space (…) But I think, I mean, I don’t think that necessarily has to result in a sort of culture of, yeah, inwardness and things. But the thing is, it’s really hard to make that critique, because it does come across as though you’re, you don’t really understand what other people are going through (Nina, student activist, 2015).

In addition to the reduced focus on class and the potential individualization and neoliberalization of grievances, Nina points to a central dilemma in contemporary student activism for social justice. On the one hand, the emphasis on experience, individual subjectivity and certain styles of speech is important in order to allow otherwise marginalized voices and positions to appear and take shape (cf. Young, 1996 ). On the other hand, however, ideals of ‘safety’ needs to be balanced against the risk of closing down conversation across difference and silencing people with alternative experiences and opinions. Here, the cultivation of activist virtues and forms of moral reasoning are also dependent on practical labour, the role of friendship and identity, and the ways of organizing within and across different activist networks.

In recent years, the upsurge in student activism for social justice has increasingly been criticized for promoting a moral absolute that shuts down debate and threatens democratic values of free speech and critical thinking. In this article, I have shown how different groups of left-wing student activists at the University of Auckland continuously and reflexively negotiate central ethical dilemmas and attempt to balance between solidarity and radicality, inclusion and exclusion and the evocation of universal moral claims and the development of a sensitivity towards particularity and otherness.

On a general moral level, fighting for ‘equality’ is a common denominator in the students’ activism. However, different activist groups focus on different aspects of this problem—or ‘iterations’ as one student activist called it. In doing so, they constantly modify and balance common or universal moral quests against other forms of ethics that emerge from and are embedded in situated practices, experiences and negotiations. Based on their varied personal experiences with marginalization, different ways of organizing and shifting engagement with activist solidary work across difference, they create different (free/safe) spaces for the cultivation of ethical ideals, subjectivities and virtues.

In 2012, the student activist network worked from the ideal of ‘dissensus’, whereas the group of queer activists that were present during my fieldwork in 2015 worked from the metaphor of creating ‘safe spaces’. Even though they shared an overall ambition of fighting inequality and creating emancipatory spaces, their choice of metaphors reflected their own experiences and positions within the university and wider society. The older group of activists were predominantly white, heterosexual, (upper-) middle-class students, while the newer group came from more marginalized backgrounds in terms of gender and sexuality. More than simply being strategic spaces for maximizing political influence, the different ‘free spaces’ they provided were framed by moral and ethical questions and desires for creating a better and more just world. They therefore experimented with new democratic forms of organizing, new ground rules for meetings and new styles of speech.

These activist free/safe spaces are characterized by constant and paradoxical tensions between creating unity and recognizing diversity; between being radical and exclusive in thought and action and being more inclusive, solidary and engaging across difference. Importantly, an ‘ordinary’ ethics and cultivation of virtues and sensibilities through practical organizing also created a difference between the groups. For some of the older activists, the tedious labour of practical organizing, where you discuss and work with different people to act on the world, was a central virtue that enabled and compelled engagement with different viewpoints, making activists modify their own goals to accommodate associated struggles.

Both the older and newer student activists recognized not only the necessity but also the danger of working with relatively separatist (safe) spaces. On the one hand, such spaces are needed to allow marginalized people to find a voice of their own, thereby enabling them to engage in wider public discussions and turning what were hitherto perceived as personal or private issues into common concerns. On the other hand, there is a danger that such spaces become overly insular, with activists avoiding or shutting down conversations with people that have different opinions and experiences from themselves.

The students’ continuous efforts to navigate these complex ethical dilemmas reflect wider moral contestations about what characterizes legitimate (counter) publics and democratic deliberation. How can we best create democratic spaces that allow marginalized people to develop a voice but also encourage a wider conversation with majority positions? To borrow a phrase from the political scientist Jane Mansbridge, the dilemma is that ‘the enclaves, which produce insights that less protected spaces would have prevented, also protect those insights from reasonable criticism’ (Mansbridge, 1996 , p. 58). Mansbridge argues, however, that the risk of groups closing in on themselves, becoming unwilling to hear anyone else and speaking a language that outsiders do not hear or understand, should not lead to the abolition of safe spaces or enclaves of deliberation. Such spaces are necessary for subaltern counter publics to take shape and gain confidence. Her point is that we can never achieve full justice since shifting power balances always create new forms of subordination. Therefore, she proposes:

We must design our lives and our institutions so that the justice that is compromised remains nagging, in the margin somewhere, in a bracket that does not go away, to pique our souls and goad us into future action (Mansbridge, 1996 , p. 59).

One could argue that the shifting networks of student activists, acting as (subaltern) counter publics, have this function of continuously ‘nagging’ or haunting the morality of established institutions. However, as amorphous networks and movements, they also have margins themselves, which, if allowed to continue to nag, can play a central role in the shaping of their own moral frame and virtues and goad them into action.

At the heart of student activism as an ethical practice, therefore, is the difficult and constant task of balancing universal moral claims with situated ethical concerns. A one-sided critique of contemporary student activism for engaging in extreme moralism that shuts down debate seems to ignore important dimensions of the students’ engagement. Rather than merely being a site for the promotion of certain universal moral claims, student activism also functions as a site for the continuous exploration and negotiation of profound moral and ethical dilemmas concerning how to conceive of and engage with others across difference.

These dilemmas are not only of importance to the internal organizing and success of a given student movement but are intrinsic to democratic deliberation and organizing more generally. In this way, student activists’ efforts to formulate and promote new moral orders and principles can be understood as a window onto core conflicts regarding value and morality in wider society that are related to processes of deliberation within and across different forms of (counter) publics and free spaces (see also McAdam, 1988 ). Their attempts to navigate these profound dilemmas—however tentative they may be—can offer important insights into how best to combine the cultivation of inclusive spaces for engagement across difference with the establishment of more exclusive learning spaces to secure the continuous development of critical voices and experimental democratic practices within higher education and in wider society.

As mentioned, the notion of safe spaces has recently played a central role in heated debates about the creation of non-discriminatory classrooms and campuses (see, e.g. Ben-Porath, 2017 ; Harris, 2015 ; Palfrey, 2017 ; Slater, 2016 ). As an organizing metaphor for communication and interaction, it involves, for example, the introduction of pronoun rounds and trigger warnings in class, and, in a more general sense, the promotion of an inclusive, non-discriminatory and emotionally non-threatening environment for minority students on campus (see, e.g. Ben-Porath, 2017 ; the Roestone Collective, 2014 ; Rom, 1998 ).

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Nielsen, G.B. (2023). The Ethics of Radical Student Activism: Social Justice, Democracy and Engagement Across Difference. In: Sevelsted, A., Toubøl, J. (eds) The Power of Morality in Movements. Nonprofit and Civil Society Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98798-5_9

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In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.

A philosophy without a politics is common enough. Aesthetes, ethicists, novelists—all may be easily critiqued and found wanting on this basis. But there is also the danger of a politics without a philosophy. A politics unmoored, unprincipled, which holds as its most fundamental commitment its own perpetuation. A Realpolitik that believes itself too subtle—or too pragmatic—to deal with such ethical platitudes as thou shalt not kill. Or: rape is a crime, everywhere and always. But sometimes ethical philosophy reënters the arena, as is happening right now on college campuses all over America. I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:

There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.

If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.

The first principle sometimes takes the “weak” to mean “whoever has the least power,” and sometimes “whoever suffers most,” but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals, among whom two of the most famous are, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr . In the pacifist’s interpretation, the body that we must place between the gears is not that of our enemy but our own. In doing this, we may pay the ultimate price with our actual bodies, in the non-metaphorical sense. More usually, the risk is to our livelihoods, our reputations, our futures. Before these most recent campus protests began, we had an example of this kind of action in the climate movement. For several years now, many people have been protesting the economic and political machinery that perpetuates climate change, by blocking roads, throwing paint, interrupting plays, and committing many other arrestable offenses that can appear ridiculous to skeptics (or, at the very least, performative), but which in truth represent a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.

I experienced this not long ago while participating in an XR climate rally in London. When it came to the point in the proceedings where I was asked by my fellow-protesters whether I’d be willing to commit an arrestable offense—one that would likely lead to a conviction and thus make travelling to the United States difficult or even impossible—I’m ashamed to say that I declined that offer. Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet. I’d just about managed to stop buying plastic bottles (except when very thirsty) and was trying to fly less. But never to see New York again? What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)! Falling at the first hurdle! Anyone who finds themselves rolling their eyes at any young person willing to put their own future into jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments lie—also whether they’ve bought a plastic bottle or booked a flight recently. A humbling inquiry.

It is difficult to look at the recent Columbia University protests in particular without being reminded of the campus protests of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, some of which happened on the very same lawns. At that time, a cynical political class was forced to observe the spectacle of its own privileged youth standing in solidarity with the weakest historical actors of the moment, a group that included, but was not restricted to, African Americans and the Vietnamese. By placing such people within their ethical zone of interest, young Americans risked both their own academic and personal futures and—in the infamous case of Kent State—their lives. I imagine that the students at Columbia—and protesters on other campuses—fully intend this echo, and, in their unequivocal demand for both a ceasefire and financial divestment from this terrible war, to a certain extent they have achieved it.

But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas— it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone. If the concept of safety is foundational to these students’ ethical philosophy (as I take it to be), and, if the protests are committed to reinserting ethical principles into a cynical and corrupt politics, it is not right to divest from these same ethics at the very moment they come into conflict with other imperatives. The point of a foundational ethics is that it is not contingent but foundational. That is precisely its challenge to a corrupt politics.

Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands. (Those brave students who—in supporting the ethical necessity of a ceasefire—find themselves at painful odds with family, friends, faith, or community have already made this calculation.) This flexibility can also have the positive long-term political effect of allowing us to comprehend that, although our duty to the weakest is permanent, the role of “the weakest” is not an existential matter independent of time and space but, rather, a contingent situation, continually subject to change. By contrast, there is a dangerous rigidity to be found in the idea that concern for the dreadful situation of the hostages is somehow in opposition to, or incompatible with, the demand for a ceasefire. Surely a ceasefire—as well as being an ethical necessity—is also in the immediate absolute interest of the hostages, a fact that cannot be erased by tearing their posters off walls.

Part of the significance of a student protest is the ways in which it gives young people the opportunity to insist upon an ethical principle while still being, comparatively speaking, a more rational force than the supposed adults in the room, against whose crazed magical thinking they have been forced to define themselves. The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.

To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment? They are putting their own bodies into the machine. They deserve our support and praise. As to which postwar political arrangement any of these students may favor, and on what basis they favor it—that is all an argument for the day after a ceasefire. One state, two states, river to the sea—in my view, their views have no real weight in this particular moment, or very little weight next to the significance of their collective action, which (if I understand it correctly) is focussed on stopping the flow of money that is funding bloody murder, and calling for a ceasefire, the political euphemism that we use to mark the end of bloody murder. After a ceasefire, the criminal events of the past seven months should be tried and judged, and the infinitely difficult business of creating just, humane, and habitable political structures in the region must begin anew. Right now: ceasefire. And, as we make this demand, we might remind ourselves that a ceasefire is not, primarily, a political demand. Primarily, it is an ethical one.

But it is in the nature of the political that we cannot even attend to such ethical imperatives unless we first know the political position of whoever is speaking. (“Where do you stand on Israel/Palestine?”) In these constructed narratives, there are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said. Once these words or phrases have been spoken ( river to the sea, existential threat, right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist ) and one’s positionality established, then and only then will the ethics of the question be attended to (or absolutely ignored). The objection may be raised at this point that I am behaving like a novelist, expressing a philosophy without a politics, or making some rarefied point about language and rhetoric while people commit bloody murder. This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.

It is in fact perhaps the most acute example in the world of the use of words to justify bloody murder, to flatten and erase unbelievably labyrinthine histories, and to deliver the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity to the many people who seem to believe that merely by saying something they make it so. It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately. They are shibboleths; they describe a people, by defining them against other people—but the people being described are ourselves. The person who says “We must eliminate Hamas” says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that. The person who uses the word “Zionist” as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920—that person does not so much bring definitive clarity to the entangled history of Jews and Palestinians as they successfully and soothingly draw a line to mark their own zone of interest and where it ends. And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us—while we do all that, bloody murder.

And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein—by my stating of a position—you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do. Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead. ♦

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157 Activist Topics & Questions About Activism

Welcome to our topics list! Here, you will find essay ideas, activism topics to talk about in discussions, research questions about activism, and more. Check it out!

🔝 Top 10 Activism Topics for Students

🏆 best activism topic ideas & essay examples, 💡 good essay topics on activism, 📌 simple & easy activism essay titles, 👍 good research topics about activism, ❓ research questions about activism.

• The Rise of Youth Activism
• Influential Women’s Rights Activists
• How Activists Protect Natural Resources
• How LGBTQ+ Activism Advances Acceptance
• Racial Justice Activism Against Systemic Racism
• Activist Movements for Ethical Treatment of Animals
• Greta Thunberg and Activism for a Sustainable Future
• How Social Justice Movements Promote Human Rights
• How Indigenous Rights Activists Uphold Their Cultural Heritage
• Activism’s Role in Promoting Transparency and Accountability
• Social Movements and Youth Activism Research done by Earl unveils that, it is vital to guarantee that young people are actively involved in social movements, and activities in order to encourage active citizenship and build programs that effectively represent their […]
• Malala Yousafzai – Pakistani Human Rights Activist The world learned about the girl after a gunman burst into a school bus and shot the girl in the head, thereby avenging her criticism of the Taliban and neglecting the prohibition to attend school.
• Judicial Activism in Australia This is where the judicial activism came about whereby even if it is not the duty of the judges to make a law, they can use the law to fit in a new situation.
• Gloria Steinem: Political Activist and Feminist Leader Thesis: Gloria Steinem’s direct, bold, argumentative, and explicit style of conveying her ideas and values is the result of her political activism, feminist leadership, and her grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem.
• Nurses’ Political Activism Process Speech As a result, there will be better access to CDC’s programs related to cancer prevention, early detection, education, and screening, as this is the first point of the policy. To draw a conclusion, one may […]
• Nurse Participation in Political Activism Political activism in nursing entails a plan for nurses to become vital in creating, impacting, and supporting healthcare policy that influences the health of citizens.
• Athlete Activism and Its Importance I agree with this article more, as it approaches the issue of athlete activism with a better understanding of the matter.
• The Connection of Race and Class to Activism In all of these cases, women suffered from sexual abuse, and the movement of #MeeToo rose, helping women save each other from the abuse.
• Judicial Review and Judicial Activism Judicial review is the power of the court to assess whether a particular law is contrary to the provisions of other laws or the Constitution.
• CEO Activism: Development and Implications In the modern world, social issues can become instantly widespread and known to the public due to the reach of mass media and general information availability.
• Intersectionality and Feminist Activism Therefore, I hope to study the academic literature to discuss the existing tendencies and difficulties to contribute to the understanding of the identified topic in terms of gender and female studies.
• Slacktivism Called Hashtag Activism It is necessary to note, for the purposes of this discussion, that activism through the internet in general is a possible and effective way of enacting change, although usually in other forms of influence.
• Film Independent Inc.’s Media Activism However, despite the advancement of inclusivity and diversity in education, the workplace, and other spheres, the film and television industry is still a work in progress in terms of equality of representation.
• Martin Luther King Jr. as an Equality Activist At one time, Martin doubted which profession to give preference to medicine or law, everything was decided in favor of the ministry of the church, which influenced the education and literacy of the future leader.
• Louis Armstrong as Civil Right Activist The image that comes to mind associated with the name of Louis Armstrong is probably a collective one of a jazz musician. As he continued signing for white audiences, he contributed to the gradual shift […]
• Political Activism: Health Coverage for Children Based on this data, is it appropriate to believe that the expansion of health coverage for children the main proposal of this policy will further contribute to the improvement of children’s quality of life.
• Nurses Political Activism Process: The Problem of Financing Nursing Education The lack of funding prevents nurses from continuing education to become more qualified while prospective students do not have enough finances to become specialists.
• Commodity Activism in a Racial Context The importance of analyzing the two campaigns lies in the possibility of showing how companies are using commodity activism to capture a target audience that shares their political views and promotes the messages of equality […]
• Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody: Process of Activism One point in Moody’s story that depicts a point in her life when she had to make the decision to act nonviolently occurs relatively early in her story as she is making the decision to […]
• Activism in Visual and Media Culture: Characteristics of Corporations They also state that these rules will be the guidelines of their operations according to the way they are provided for by the UN declaration about the right of workers and the international labor standards.
• Activism in Visual and Media Culture For example, in America, there was the movement called the Black Panthers that fought for the rights of the minority and the working class.
• Malala Yousafzai Activist as a Leader Malala Yousafzai is a young girl who has taken the mantle to feel the leadership vacuum in the Pakistan education sector.
• Judicial Activism: Term Definition The principle of judicial activism can violate the principle of separation of powers since it has been interpreted as legislation from the bench which amounts to judicial tyranny or judicial dictatorship.
• Judicial Activism and Restraint in the United States The rubric for measuring judicial activism is wide and well elaborated in a continuum of dealings by federal judges such as wrong interpretation of accepted methodology, using a policy that is substantive, adjusting interpretations and […]
• Disabled Activist Narrative in Irish Society Many people, including some politicians, believe that disabled activists fight for special privileges, while all they want is to enjoy the same rights and opportunities as other people do.
• Communication Final Project: Youth Activism, Social Media, and Political Change Through Children’s Books Picture the Dream was an unconventional exhibition of children’s picture books related to the topic of the Civil Rights Movement and was held in the High Museum of Art.
• Youth-Led Activism and Political Engagement in New Zealand As the authors admit themselves, this choice of topic was due to the article being a part of a larger research project on the organization’s activism in New Zealand.
• Jazz and Activism Relationships In the given article, the author attempted to analyze the musical-theoretical and cultural foundations of jazz from the 1960s to the 20th century in the socio-cultural aspect, establishing the relationship between socio-political events and the […]
• Intersectionality and Activism: Politics of Inclusivity Nevertheless, it is crucial to introduce intersectionality into modern movements to ensure the inclusion and protection of the rights of vulnerable groups.
• The Gay Community’s Activism Events Research through interviews actually indicates that more than 60% of the population in the United States has come to the recognition and appreciation of their gay counterparts.
• Deaf Youth: Social Justice Through Media and Activism The Deaf Youth USA for instance strives to educate, inspire, and empower the deaf youth to make difference in the communities.
• Shirin Ebadi’s Perspective on Women’s Human Rights Activism and Islam It is worth noting that Shirin Ebadi’s self-identity as an Iranian woman and a Muslim empowers her experience and perspective in women’s rights activism.
• Perils and Possibilities of Doing Transnational Feminist Activism These have promoted awareness of human rights among women and other masses, ensured and led to the adoption of the rules and regulations recognizing women rights and that supports ending of women violations and participated […]
• The Possibilities of Transnational Activism The implied position underlying the focus objectives of this paper come from the understanding that the influence of society on the state and vice versa is unavoidable.
• Russell Means: Activist for American Indian Rights He says he prefers the term American Indian because with it he says he knows the origin. It was in the 1960s that he fought for the rights of the American Indians under the American […]
• Shareholder Activism: Business Responsibility and Sustainability The investment culture across the world is highly dependent on the ability of financial institutions and investors to collaborate in addressing various issues relating to corporate governance and the principle of the common good.
• Shareholder Activism and Responsible Investment as Integral Parts of Corporate Social Responsibility Therefore, with the application of SA, one can shape corporate behaviors and choices in order to champion the needs and rights of shareholders in regard to a particular business.
• Brand Activism and Green Advertising Relationship Depending on the nature of activism, commodities in the market can be ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and consumers have a choice of making ethical consumption.
• Gender Identities and Politics of Women’s Activism This paper applies the constructs of politics and identity to women’s activism and the challenges many women face when challenging established gender expectations.
• Social Activism Against Plastic Pollution Of the 30 million tons of plastic waste in the United States in 2009, only 7% were sent for recycling, which primarily damages marine life.
• Anti-Violence Activism: Engaging Diverse Men Overall, the article by Peretz helps to understand the importance of collaboration with men in movements that target domestic violence and determine specific factors that facilitate their involvement.
• Activism and Career in the Self-Discovery Process The main argument that can be put forward is that both career and activism are the results of a developed self, but at the same time, they can change people’s perception of themselves and their […]
• Role of Social Media in Activism and Revolution The intent was to condemn that act in the presence of the senior manager. Baxter’s response to the situation was good.
• Political Openness and Transnational Activism: Comparative Insights From Labor Activism In particular, the author points out that the influence of the options is more potent than that of the existing economic and political factors.
• Helen Zia’s Speech About Social Activism In the speech by Helen Zia, we are introduced to the power of activism in helping to bring relevant social issues to the attention of the general public and how through activism true and lasting […]
• Social Media Appropriation for Activism The new practice of socializing via social media allows for building new types of relationships between people, and this phenomenon is actively used by activists to make their ideas attractive to the public and share […]
• Bill Browder’s Corporate Activism Strategy As a response, Browder had to take into account some of the basic aspects of the Russian corporate governance environment and thereby deciding to take the option of shareholder activism as a corrective measure.
• The Impact of Domestic Violence Laws: Social Norms and Legal Consequences I also suppose that some of these people may start lifting their voices against the law, paying particular attention to the idea that it is theoretically allowable that the law can punish people for other […]
• HIV/AIDS Activism in “How to Survive a Plague” The main parties involved in the process of the social construction of AIDS in the USA were the activists, policymakers, and the media.
• Frederick Douglass as an Anti-Slavery Activist In “What to the slave is the fourth of July?” the orator drives the attention of his audience to a serious contradiction: Americans consider the Declaration of independence a document that proclaimed freedom, but this […]
• North American Environmental Transnational Activism Unlike in the past where scholars of international relations viewed the state-system as the fundamental focus of scholarly and practical attention, contemporary researchers are increasingly focussing on transnational activism as a major hub of influence […]
• Activist and Feminist Rose Schneiderman In 1926 Schneiderman became the president of Women’s Trade Union League in the United States, she was also a close friend of Eleanor and Franklin D.
• Artistic Activism and Tactics 3 The outbreak of violent protests in the capital city of France in mid-1968 was because of the Student dissatisfaction at the Sorbonne University and the University of Paris. 9 Accordingly, the right to the […]
• Queer Activism Influences on the Social Development of LGBT The strength of the research question is that it shows a different direction to the queer movement as a social movement and its effect on identity creation of the LGBT community.
• Mass Media and Activist Groups It is crucial to point out that this movement turned global, after many of the activists took to both the traditional and the new mass media avenues to express their interests. In addition, the relationship […]
• Tactical Media Activism in Egypt In this paper, the focus is on the view and the role of the tactical media and the media activists in these protests.
• The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online The author makes a number of arguments three of which are The cyberspace users form a society: The internet offers a platform where people grow stronger in the pursuit of their rights The civil society […]
• Design Activism to Contemporary Designers As a result, scholars have coined the term “design activism” to enhance the role of designers to the society. The rise of many designers as a profession has been in a crossroads to decide on […]
• Activism and Technology Media justice frame is the newest frame to be established, and it advocates for involvement of the minority in the governance of a country.
• Alvin Ailey – an Activist and American Choreographer Alvin Ailey first performed with a group of young modern black dancers in 1958 and this led to the birth of his Dance Theatre which grew into a big premier dance company in America.
• Does Social Media Influence Activism and Revolution on the World Stage? Social media still has a lot to prove in terms of its effect on activism and revolution on the world stage at this point in time.
• The Life and Activism of Harriet Tubman, an American Abolitionist and Humanitarian
• The Wall Street Walk and Shareholder Activism: Exit as a Form of Voice
• The Wolf at the Door: The Impact of Hedge Fund Activism on Corporate Governance
• The Importance of Social Media to Activism
• The Increase in Judicial Activism in Ran Hirschl’s Towards Juristocracy
• Women ‘s Political Activism During The 19th Century
• The Issue of Social Justice Activism in Various Social Media Networks
• Difference Between Judicial Activism And Judicial Restraint
• Timely Partnerships? Contrasting Geographies of Activism in New Zealand and Australia
• Agency Theory in Practice: A Qualitative Study of Hedge Fund Activism in Japan
• World ‘s Centers Of Arab Journalism And Political Activism
• Understanding Islamic Activism in the Middle East
• An Analysis of Idealism and Radical Activism in Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up by Whalen and Flacks
• American Indian Movement: Activism And Repression
• Women Activism and Participation in Reforms Throughout the History of America
• Bottom-Up Activism: A Local Political Strategy for Higher Policy Change
• Creating Space For Citizenship: The Liminal Politics of Undocumented Activism
• The Importance of Considering Nonbinary Persons on Gender and Activism
• An Analysis of the Public Response to John Lennon’s Assassination and His Political Activism
• The Negative Side of Men’s Right Activism and the Significance of Social Equality of the Sexes
• US Barbarians at the Japan Gate: Cross Border Hedge Fund Activism
• The Supreme Court A Court Of Judicial Restraint And Activism
• Caution and Activism? Monetary Policy Strategies in an Open Economy
• The Southern Roots of Ida B Wells-Barnett’s Revolutionary Activism
• The Journalism And Activism Compatible By Susan B. Anthony
• The Mission and Activism of the Life Choices Pregnancy Resource Center, a Non-Profit Organization Supporting Women with Unplanned Pregnancies
• The Social Activism in the Works of Charles Dana Gibson and Elizabeth Shippen Green
• The Role of Student Activism in Pushing Forward the Feminist Movement in the 1960s
• Women ‘s Activism Throughout Latin America And The Caribbean
• Ties That Bind: How Business Connections Affect Mutual Fund Activism
• Corporate Social Responsibility, Public Policy, and NGO Activism in Europe and the United States: An Institutional-Stakeholder Perspective
• Cultivating Capabilities through Activism: Examples from India
• Towards the Resilient Region?: Policy Activism and Peripheral Region Development
• The Role of Hacktivists in the Future of Activism
• The Real Effects of Hedge Fund Activism: Productivity, Risk, and Product Market Competition
• The Paradoxes and Pitfalls of Revived Fiscal Activism
• White Slave Crusades : Race Gender And Anti Vice Activism
• Union Commitment and Activism in Britain and the United States: Searching for Synthesis and Synergy for Renewal
• Using Taylor Rules to Assess the Relative Activism of the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Board
• The Politics of Shareholder Activism in Nigeria
• The Returns to Hedge Fund Activism in Germany
• The Progressive Movement: Anti-Monopoly Activism, Social Control and Cohesion, and Increased Efficiency
• The Politics and Activism of the Working Class Women in the 20th Century
• Trust, Coordination, and the Industrial Organization of Political Activism
• The Organizational Roots of Political Activism: Field Experiments on Creating a Relational Context
• Union Activism, Workers’ Satisfaction and Organizational Change
• What Makes Activism Effective?
• How Can Social Activism Help Fight Social Challenges?
• What Factors Must Activists Consider When Organizing for Social Change?
• Does Coordinated Institutional Activism Work?
• Who Profits From Legislative Activism?
• Does Government Activism Affect Second-Hand Car Prices?
• Why Did the Activism of the 60s Have Such a Lasting Impact on College Campuses?
• What Do Activists Fight?
• Does Institutional Activism Increase Shareholder Wealth?
• What Are Some Causes of Activism?
• When Does Institutional Investor Activism Increase Shareholder Value?
• What Are the Main Sources of Women’s Activism Around Climate Change?
• How Does Activism Affect Society?
• What Are Different Forms of Activism?
• How Can Social Activism Affect Social Change?
• What Is Social Issue Activism?
• How Does Activism Relate to Community Building?
• What Does It Take to Be an Activist?
• How Do Activists Make Money?
• What Is the Difference Between Activism and Advocacy?
• How Can Social Activism Help the Lack of Basic Services?
• What Is the Opposite of an Activist?
• Can Anyone Be an Activist?
• What Are the Pros and Cons of Social Media Activism?
• How Can Social Responsibility Help Fight Poverty?
• What Is Negative Activism?
• Why Do People Use Social Media for Activism?
• What Do Human Rights Activists Do?
• How Do Social Movements Bring About Change?
• Why Is It Important to Raise Social Concerns Through Social Movements?
• Civil Rights Movement Questions
• Public Safety Research Ideas
• Health Promotion Research Topics
• Public Service Research Topics
• Nonprofit Organizations Paper Topics
• Environmentalism Essay Topics
• Social Policy Essay Ideas
• Abuse Research Topics
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 20). 157 Activist Topics & Questions About Activism. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/activism-essay-topics/

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "157 Activist Topics & Questions About Activism." February 20, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/activism-essay-topics/.

Student Activism

We provide young people with training and tools to build coalitions, call out injustice, and actively work for positive social change.

Jump to a section:

Important Terms

Keys to Becoming an Activist

Books for Youth

Books for Adults

Ideas for Action

Important Activism Terms

• Activism : an intentional action with the goal of bringing about social change. ( Amherst College )
• Activist : a person who diligently and repeatedly tries to achieve some social, economic, or political objective, especially by participation in protest, pressure, organizing, or resistance. ( Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts )
• Advocacy (or lobbying) : organized initiatives that seek to change laws or rules, often by talking to or influencing decision-makers such as elected officials, or in the case of education, a principal or school board.
• Saviorism : a character (in books or film) or person that “rescues” the marginalized from their oppression ( learn more about saviorism in this video from OnlyBlackGirl )
• Coalition : a group of individuals and/or organizations with a common interest who agree to work together toward a common goal. ( Community Tool Box )

Keys to Becoming and Being an Activist

Anyone can be an activist — you don’t need to pass a test or get a membership card! However, there are some important guidelines and distinctions to remember about what makes an effective activist. We feel Lindy’s article on Medium makes some good points :

• An activist tries to directly influence social change by taking action, beyond raising awareness.
• An activist is educated on their cause.
• An activist is open to discussion and dialogue.
• An activist doesn’t have to advocate for a big cause to be an activist.

These are just the highlights, so read Lindy’s full article before you dive in.

A word of caution: being an effective activist includes learning about the other groups who have already been working on the issue you care about, and finding ways to support or integrate your work where possible. Don’t be the new person who joins the movement, steals the limelight and disregards the work of those who have already been there. If you truly care about your cause, you will find ways to collaborate with and support others who have the same passion and mission.

Long story short: identify a cause or injustice you care about; become educated on that issue; find allies and accomplices in the community; and take action! It’s that simple.

Youth Activists Who Inspire Us

Here’s a list of students and youth (age 22 and younger) who are leading activism today, whether on the local or national level. They inspire and inform our work. Follow them on social media, or seek out opportunities to hear them speak to dig deeper on these issues.

YCD Workshops on Student Activism

YCD has a curated library of over 60 workshop guides on every aspect of inclusion and justice work for middle and high school youth to explore in their own youth-led club or group — with new workshops being published every month. These guides can also be used by educators as part of their in-school curriculum, where interested.

Below is a free sample workshop created by YCD on the topic of activism, available for anyone to use and download.

Bystanders vs. Upstanders

When you witness an oppressive incident, will you be a bystander or an upstander? Students will learn about the role of an upstander and the value of being an upstander vs. a bystander.

Other topics available as downloadable workshop guides or offered at YCD conferences/events include:

What is My Activism?

What does it mean to be an activist? How can young people join an existing movement and build collective power? Explore these and related topics through this activity.

From Slacktivism to Activism

Student leaders will engage with each other about leadership, social media activism and traditional activism, how they work together and what has been the most impactful. Students attendees will share their experiences, gain ideas from others and identify ways they can engage in activism to challenge issues and promote social justice in their communities.

Know Your Rights: Students’ Rights

All people in the United States enjoy the same constitutional protections, regardless of nationality, religion, immigration status, sexual identity, disability and gender. The best way to protect your rights is to know your rights. In this workshop, we share information on students’ rights related to free speech, dress codes, privacy, LGBTQ rights, and immigrants’ rights. We’ll also cover what to do if your school violates these protections.

To experience these workshops, YCD events, and much more, start or join a YCD chapter!

Videos to Explore Student Activism

How to be a Youth Activist

What does it mean to be an activist, especially if you’re still in high school? In this video, a student from YCD’s Student Virtual Board interviews Tay Anderson , Director of the Denver Public Schools Board, and Amy Brown from BLM5280, to explore this topic and discuss why speaking out against injustice is so important in 2020 and beyond.

How to Start (or Improve) a Youth-Led Inclusion and Justice Club

Whether you are a student or educator, whether you are just starting a club or group or have an existing one — YCD provides a helpful series of exercises and ideas so your group can organize, find resources, and create an action project to advance inclusion and justice.

Native Youth Activists Speak Out

In this video we hear from Mason Estes, Leala Pourier and Lily Joy Winder about their activism work to advance racial, indigenous and environmental justice, as well as a group conversation about what celebrating Indigenous People’s Day is about, how they spent the day, why it’s important, and why it should be much more than one day.

Dealing with Opposition in Activism

It’s great to be passionate about wanting to create change; however, it’s wise you learn about all the different roadblocks you will most likely face during the process.

Let’s Roll Up Our Sleeves and Make Change

Colorado State Representative Leslie Herod inspires us with her personal story of how she became involved in activism, politics and making positive social change.

Stay up to date for future student-generated videos on this topic and more by subscribing to YCD’s YouTube channel.

Activism Books for Students

Here is a list of recommended books for students and teens that explore and address activism — past, present, or future. You can find free e-books or your local library using OverDrive.com .

Activism Books for Educators and Parents

And this list is for educators, parents and adults looking for guidance on how to support student activism.

Movies Featuring Activism

Below are movies that address or inspire activism in meaningful and compelling ways.

Podcasts on Activism

Here is a list of recommended podcasts you can download and follow to explore activism in more detail.

Local Actions for Students to Engage in Activism

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has a good list of methods for how students can engage in activism , which we’ve reprinted here in bullet form with some additional commentary. Whatever campaign or cause you are pursuing, you will probably want to use several of these methods at different times, rather than focusing on just one method.

• Educate others . Actually, first educate yourself. This step is critical! Once you’re ready to educate others, make sure you are centering the voices of the people most affected by the issue. Allies and accomplices can support but should not take the mic, so to speak, from those affected. Above all, make sure you are not engaging in saviorism.
• Advocate for legislation . Get advice and help from those who have lobbied before, if possible. Legislative changes generally must take place during specific times of the year, and depending on the issue, may require significant coalition-building. Also remember laws can be changed at the local and state level, not just the federal level.
• Run for office . Need some inspiration? Learn about the journey of Tay Anderson , who ran for the Denver School Board of Education when he was still in high school; while unsuccessful at first, he has since won election to the Board at just 21 years old and is a leading voice of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in Denver.
• Protest . This is often the most common vision we have when someone says activist . Protests can be powerful displays against injustice, but also can be dangerous in certain situations. Here’s an article from Wired with some good tips on what to bring and not bring to a protest, and what you should do before, during and after the event .
• Create a public awareness campaign that includes social media . Note the word campaign which signifies a long-term, repeated effort with a defined goal, not just a single or casual post.
• Do a survey about the issue and share the results . Data is a very compelling way to convince stubborn policymakers and those in power to change their mind!
• Raise money . All causes need funds to feed people, buy supplies, or pay salaries. Doing a fundraiser for a non-profit that has 501(c)(3) status with the IRS can be a powerful way to support activism even if you’re not “on the front lines.”
• Write a letter to a company . This method is useful if you are protesting against the actions of a specific company or organization, or if you want to invite a company to join a coalition you are building.
• Engage in community service . This is in addition to other methods; community service is not generally viewed as activism by itself.
• Get the press involved . Creating publicity (positive or negative) for your cause can be one of the best ways to shift public opinion and create the atmosphere for change. Make sure to prepare adequately so that when the press shows up with interview questions, you’re ready with the answers.

Do you have a suggestion of an addition or resource for this page? Share your idea with us.

Ready to get started?

Student Activism in the Context of the 1930s

This period of political ferment was well under way in the 1920s when the economic crisis of the Great Depression of 1929 devastated Americans’ lives, and intensified the period’s anticommunism, labor activism, racism and antisemitism. American foreign policy was shaped by competing views of the nation’s relationship to the world as fascism and dictatorship took hold in Italy, Japan, Germany, and Spain, from the mid-1920s and throughout the 1930s, resulting in WWII. The United States Senate demanded complete neutrality and isolation while President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought greater support for Britain and European allies.

Minnesota was an epicenter of the politics of the 1930s when the Farmer-Labor Party, one of the nation’s most successful progressive third parties, was victorious in electing dozens of statewide and local officials and controlling the governor’s office from 1930–1938. Some Republicans, the other dominant political party, which favored business and capitalism, sought to purge left-wing politicians, union activists, and progressive students and faculty from public life and accused them, no matter what their views were, of being un-American Communists.

The Great Depression

In 1929, the crash of the stock market abruptly transformed Americans’ lives. In October of that year unemployment stood at 3%. By 1931, 25% of the workforce was unemployed. The poorest areas of Minneapolis faced much greater unemployment. On Minnesota’s Iron Range, iron ore mining districts around Lake Superior, it was as high as 70%. Combined with drought in the Great Plains, the region and the state faced poverty, hunger, and unemployment, as did the nation, on an unprecedented scale. Campus life was remembered by two former students.

Eric Sevareid , an undergraduate and activist at the University of Minnesota from 1934–1936, recalled the Depression.

[In 1933] We observed bread lines from the street car as we went to school carrying the books that described the good society. We duly listened to lectures on orthodox economics, which explained the “natural laws” of capitalist competition, which would, if not interfered with, ultimately produce the general good by permitting everyone to pursue his selfish ends unhindered. And every day the headlines spoke of riots, of millions thrown out of work, of mass migrations by the desperate. All of this was happening in the richest country on earth, a country that possessed all the political rights and instruments by which free men could change their condition-and still they could not prevent this…The system did not work, and if it did not work in America it certainly would not work anywhere.

Eric Sevareid Not So Wild A Dream Eric Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream (First published 1946; reprint Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 55-56.

Rosalind Matusow Belmont , a student at the University and activist during the 1930s, described her memories of the period on campus.

There were some fraternities, but the majority of students at that time were pretty much from pretty low income families and [they had] an alliance, an identification whenever there was some kind of a labor activity. I remember later on when Strutwear [a knitting works] went on strike [in 1935], and some of the other strikes occurred, the students were interested and they wanted to go down to the picket lines and they wanted to find out what was going on, they were very much interested. Most of the students were trying to find a way to keep going to school, a lot of the students worked, a lot of the students worked in cafeterias so that they’d be able to get their meals as a way of working. [We would go to the] White Castle, where you could get six hamburgers for 25 cents, and we used to go in you know and get six and split, but everybody was very, very poor, people did not have money, there was a streetcar, we thought it was spending too much money to take the streetcar, and we hitchhiked to save a nickel. Everybody around me that I can remember was having a lot of trouble with money, even in the University dormitory where I went the first semester. Most of the people who lived there at the University were farmers’ daughters you know, and I can remember they made their own clothes and most of them were working part-time to be able to make it through college. It was you know, and people didn’t have jobs.

Rosalind Matusow Belmont Minnesota Historical Society, Oral History Project Oral history interview with Rosalind Matusow Belmont, April 4, 1982, 20th Century Radicalism In Minnesota Oral History Project, Minnesota Historical Society, pages 6-7, http://www2.mnhs.org/library/findaids/oh30.xml.

Farmer-Labor Party

Minnesotans responded to the Great Depression in part by voting into office in the 1930s governors, senators, congress members and city-level officials affiliated with the Farmer-Labor Party, one of the nation’s most successful progressive third parties. Its members never controlled the State Senate of the Minnesota Legislature. Its roots went to the 19th century, but the party developed from 1917 through the 1930s and began to lose strength by the early 1940s.

The strong coalition in Minnesota between workers and farmers, who originally created the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota in 1917 to secure fair prices for wheat, grew as a result of unemployment and poverty. It brought a new enthusiasm for the party platform that included funding for building roads, relief from farm foreclosures, and the creation of a state income tax to finance employment. Its leaders were anti-corporate and pro-organized labor. They advocated for many of the programs that would be introduced by the New Deal, including Social Security and the right to organize unions.

There were three Farmer-Labor governors between 1931 and 1938: Floyd B. Olson, who served from 1931 to 1936, Hjalmar Petersen, who served from 1936 to 1937 to finish Olson’s term as a result of his death, and Elmer Benson, who served from 1937 to 1939. Olson and Benson had a substantial impact on the University of Minnesota. Republicans in state politics, as well as Republican administrators on campus, were in constant conflict with the vision of the Farmer-Labor movement. Richard M. Valelly, Radicalism in the States: The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the American Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

This 1928 poster marked the alliance of two Progressive political parties that were committed to the rights of workers and farmers in Minnesota.

This 1928 poster marked the rise of the Farmer-Labor Party, which grew out of the alliance of two progressive political parties that were committed to the rights of workers and farmers in Minnesota to earn a decent living. From 1930-1938 the Farmer-Labor party was the most successful state-level third party in the United States. It controlled the governorship, senate, and many house seats in the state legislature.

The Politics of War

World War II formally began in 1939. The rise of fascist states in Europe, however, began far earlier, and the question of war dominated the decade until the United States declared war in 1941. Much of the decade was taken up with the question of whether the United States would join the fight against the enemies of democracy.

Throughout the 1920s and the 1930s the majority of Americans opposed war and embraced isolationism. Anti-war factions of the period in the United States included both the right and reft wings of American political life. The America First Committee, whose hundreds of thousands of supporters centered in the Midwest and included Nazi supporters, conservative businesspeople, and antisemitic populists, opposed any form of intervention in global relationships. At the same time, left-wing activists were anti-war as well until 1941 when Hitler unilaterally broke his non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. Pacifists opposed all war on principle. Progressive activists believed that WWI enriched bankers, industrialists, and capitalists and that could be the only motivation for war.

Overall, little could shake politicians during the mid-1930s from isolationism despite the rise of fascism, Germany’s invasion of its neighbors, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, Japan’s invasion of China, and attacks on American ships by German submarines. Official state persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime beginning in 1933 moved remarkably few non-Jewish Americans, and the news of Nazi death camps and the extermination of Jews, as well as Roma, disabled and gay people, also seemed to have little effect.

Popular opinion did shift at the end of the decade as the theaters of war and international alliances changed. In 1940, after the Nazi occupation of France, Belgium, Norway, Holland, and Denmark, many Americans questioned neutrality. When the United States entered the war in 1941 after a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, most, but by no means all, of the opposition ended. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 290-301.

Herb Block cartoon from 1935 depicting the isolationist position in the United States Senate against any kind of U.S. involvement, which left allies vulnerable to Nazi invasion.

A Herblock (Herbert Lawrence Block, 1909-20001) cartoon from 1935 satirizing the isolationist, anti-war position of the interwar U.S. Senate. The drawing includes a defiant politician in Washington, D.C., oblivious to the numerous commercial ships and airplanes that continued to entangle the US with the fate of the wider world.

In the 1930s, the United States Senate took an isolationist position against any kind of U.S. involvement in international engagements, ranging from refusal to join the World Court to the passage of the various Neutrality Acts, which left allies vulnerable to Nazi domination.

Herblock was one of the nation’s most effective political cartoonists from the 1930s-2001).

This Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) 1941 cartoon appeared when neutrality about the Nazi and Fascist war in Europe was losing popularity among Americans. It gained popularity again following the election of Donald Trump in 2016 because of his revival of the slogan “America First.”

“And the Wolf Said” is a cartoon penned by Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) in 1941, that appeared in PM Magazine, when neutrality toward Nazi and fascist aggression in Europe was losing popularity among Americans, who increasingly expressed concern for allies suffering from Nazi aggression.This now-famous Dr. Seuss cartoon satirized the isolationist “America First” movement of the early 1940s, highlighting its nativist underpinnings and moral absurdity. The cartoon began circulating again after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 because of his evocation of “America First” in his political rhetoric.

Anti-Communism

The anxiety over communism and who was a Communist dominated the decade. The Communist Party of the United States was involved in the struggle for African American rights, student activism, and the labor movement. However, many left-wing activists were not Communists. Accusations of communism became a slur used against virtually anyone critical of capitalism or corporate power. The FBI was empowered to investigate subversives beginning in 1936 at the direction of President Franklin Roosevelt. Director J. Edgar Hoover focused primarily on people and groups he considered Communists as well as Nazis. In this period of student activism on campus, membership in organizations such as the Communist Club were not prohibited by any laws. Administrators who had employees spy on student groups, did so because of their own political views. Larry Ceplair, Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America (Santa Barbara: Praeger Press, 2011).

If you have information about the University of Minnesota in the 1930s that you would like to add, or reflections on other campus struggles, please contact us at [email protected]

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Regan Crotty ’00 named new Dean of Undergraduate Students

Dean of Undergraduate Students Regan Crotty '00.

Sameer a. khan / fotobuddy.

Regan Crotty ’00 will serve as Princeton’s new dean of undergraduate students, according to a University announcement made July 15. Crotty will now lead the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students (ODUS), which is responsible for co-curricular and extracurricular aspects of student life. 

“I think if you had asked me 15 years ago what my ideal or dream job was, I would have told you it would be dean of undergraduate students at Princeton,” Crotty told The Daily Princetonian in an interview.

Crotty brings to the role a decade of experience serving in various capacities at the University. After graduating from Princeton in 2000, she went on to earn her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School before returning to Princeton as an ODUS investigator, responsible for investigating alleged violations of University policy. Following that role, she was Interim Executive Director for Planning Administration in the Office of Vice President for Campus Life (VPCL) where she managed travel oversight, supervised ROTC and Outdoor Action, and represented the VPCL on various committees.

From 2012 to 2014, Crotty served as Director for Student Life, now called Assistant Dean for Student Life (ADSL), in First College, which was named Wilson College at the time. With the position falling under ODUS, Crotty sees her experience in this “mini dean” role as important in shaping her understanding of student life and the office. 

“[The role is] so varied. You work on student support, student crisis situations, discipline, programming, overseeing the RCAs. That was invaluable in terms of understanding the life of the undergraduate student,” Crotty said. “Hopefully I can support them [the ADSLs] in ways that maybe you couldn’t if you hadn’t had that job before.” 

In 2014, when the University was found to be in violation of Title IX over sexual harassment charges by the U.S. Department of Education, Crotty became the inaugural Director of Gender Equity and Title IX Administration and held the position for eight years.

Student protests against the Title IX office took place in 2019 after the University took disciplinary action, including four semesters of academic probation, against a student who graffitied “Title IX protects rapists” on a University walkway. The protestors created a list of 11 demands , one of which called for Crotty’s dismissal, but was later amended to call for a review of her actions.

Crotty said that as a result of the protests, both an external and internal review containing students, faculty, and staff, took place to review the processes and procedures of the office.

“In both of those reviews, they identified areas where things were working well and areas where we could make improvements. So I think ultimately, as a result of those protests, our systems or processes improved,” Crotty shared. 

Some members of Princeton Students for Title IX Reform (PIXR) have said that the University’s changes did not address the “root problems” of the office, such as not expanding services for survivors.

Trump administration-era revisions to Title IX in 2020 regarding transgender people, prompted another round of changes for the department.

“First of all, they’re very complicated, and they’re going to be confusing for the community to understand,” Michele Minter, Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity, said at the time during an Undergraduate Student Government meeting. “In general, we think they’re going to have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to go through the process.” 

Crotty said that the University would guard students regardless of gender identity, as policies floated at the time by Secretary of Education Betsy Devos threatened to curtail resources for transgender students.

Crotty left her position in the Title IX office, passing the torch to Randy Hubert who still serves in the role. Over the past two years, Crotty left the University as an Assistant General Counsel at Morgan Lewis from 2022 to spring 2024. 

“When the opportunity came up to be Assistant General Counsel at Morgan Lewis, it seemed like a good professional change,” Crotty said. “That all said, I really missed Princeton, I missed students, missed my colleagues, … I missed the culture. And so when I learned that Dean [Kathleen] Deignan had retired, I knew that I’d regret it if I didn’t look into coming back in this role.”

One of Crotty’s main goals as Dean of Undergraduate Students is to foster belonging as a central and crucial aspect of the Princeton student experience.

“I was really struck [when] I read a quote from President [Christopher] Eisgruber, and he had taken it from President Bowen,” Crotty explained, “that all students should feel that they’re at Princeton as hosts and not merely guests. That really resonated with me. We know that feeling like you belong is important in wellness and mental health.”

To accomplish this goal, Crotty wants to place an emphasis on student input and relationships.

“I want to hear directly from students what’s working well, where we could make improvements, how we can collectively make this a better place for everyone,” Crotty said. “If a student has an idea about a student organization or an event we should plan, we want to facilitate that. We want to make it as easy as possible for you.”

Crotty also plans to routinely assess University discipline, drawing on her experience in the Title IX office.

“My office oversees discipline, and we’re really continuing to look at ways to make our disciplinary processes more compassionate,” she said.

“Being an investigator and being in the Title IX Office and being a Director of Student Life, it seemed like it all came together in the role of dean of undergraduate students,” she concluded. 

Thomas Catalano is an assistant News editor for the ‘Prince.’

Please direct corrections requests to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.

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How the Kids Online Safety Act Was Dragged Into a Political War

The Senate overwhelmingly passed the Kids Online Safety Act on Tuesday, but the legislation faces an uphill battle in the House because of censorship concerns.

By Cecilia Kang

Reporting on child online safety from Washington

Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union sent 300 high school students to Capitol Hill to lobby against the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill meant to protect children online.

The teenagers told the staffs of 85 lawmakers that the legislation could censor important conversations, particularly among marginalized groups like L.G.B.T.Q. communities.

“We live on the internet, and we are afraid that important information we’ve accessed all our lives will no longer be available,” said Anjali Verma, a 17-year-old rising high school senior from Bucks County, Pa., who was part of the student lobbying campaign. “Regardless of your political perspective, this looks like a censorship bill.”

The effort was one of many escalations in recent months by those who oppose the bill. In June, a progressive nonprofit, Fight for the Future, organized students to write hundreds of letters to urge lawmakers to scrap it. Conservative groups like Patriot Voices, founded by the former Republican senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, are also protesting with an online petition.

What was supposed to be a simple piece of legislation to protect children online has been dragged into a heated political war. At the heart of the battle are concerns about how the bill could affect free speech on culturally divisive issues, which both sides of the spectrum worry could be weaponized under the guise of child safety. Liberals worry about censorship of transgender care, while conservatives are concerned about the same with anti-abortion efforts. The tech industry has also latched onto the same First Amendment arguments to oppose the bill.

The controversy stems from the specific terms of the Kids Online Safety Act , or KOSA. The legislation would require social media platforms and other sites to limit features that can heighten cyberbullying, harassment and the glorification of self-harm. The bill would also require tech companies to turn on the highest privacy and safety settings for users under 17 and let them opt out of some features that have been shown to lead to compulsive use.

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University Library

Announcing the 2024-2025 center for archival research and training (cart) fellow: annika berry.

The University Library is thrilled to introduce Annika Berry as the recipient of the 2024-2025 Fellowship in the Center for Archival Research and Training (CART) .

Annika is a PhD student in the Creative/Critical Writing program of the Literature department. Originally from Portland, Oregon, they previously completed an MFA in Environmental Art and Social Practice at UC Santa Cruz, and also hold a BFA in Film, Animation, and Video from the Rhode Island School of Design. Annika is both a visual artist and writer, having exhibited in galleries and museums nationwide. Her archival experience includes collecting oral histories for the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and managing projects and exhibitions for artists in New Mexico and New York.

When she begins her fellowship in Fall 2024, Annika will be immersed in Special Collections & Archives for a full academic year, devoting 20 hours per week to archives and public projects in the library. Annika will process and make available the papers of Donna Haraway , UCSC Distinguished Professor Emerita in History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies. Annika will then curate a public exhibition showcasing archival collections, opening in Spring 2025.

Stay tuned for more information on Annika’s work throughout the year!

Meet Annika Berry

Tell us a little bit about your background. How did you decide to come to UCSC for your graduate studies?

I arrived as part of the first cohort of the Environmental Art & Social Practice MFA program. I was drawn by so many things… the legacy of social and environmental justice and activism on campus, the interdisciplinary scholarship that emerges here, the location, the ocean. Less than a year in, I had the opportunity to take courses with faculty in the creative writing program and fell in love with working at that intersection between writing and visual art. And also (I was living across the country at the time in the midst of deep pandemic) I Googled the campus, audibly swooned, etc.

You’ve been working on an archival project for a while on the author S. Paige Baty. What are some of the most interesting aspects you’ve found so far in this work?

About six months after moving here, I stumbled across one of Baty’s books at Bad Animal (that used bookstore in town) and was intrigued by her written voice. I wanted to learn more about her, but could hardly find any information online. I ended up learning that Baty had been a student in the History of Consciousness program in the 1980s, so I began curiously reaching out to people who I thought might have known her. That search began to reveal a vast and complicated archive. One of the most interesting aspects of the work has been the problem of how to make legible the things that are so often absent from institutional archives: ephemeral elements like emotions, feelings, half-forgotten memories, lost and missing texts… I suppose I’m obsessed with how to make space in an archive for everything it “can’t” contain.

How did you hear about CART, and what attracted you to the fellowship?

I first heard about CART a year or so ago and recognized it as a really unique opportunity to deep-dive into archival theory and practice. When the call emerged for someone to work on the Haraway papers, I was so excited. Overall, I really value CART’s commitment to accessibility, and seeking out new ways to invite broad community and student engagement with archives in general. These collections can feel intimidating to approach, but I really believe there’s so much creative work waiting to happen in and around these sites.

What are some of your favorite things to do outside of your studies and work?

Santa Cruz has taught me how to slow down! But admittedly, the things I love doing here are probably familiar: swimming in the ocean, walking around the arboretum, cooking with insane year-round produce. Over the past year, I’ve been exploring the UC Natural Reserve System, getting away for little weekend writing retreats with friends and seeing more of the Central Coast. It sounds silly but I also love e-mail — not for school or work, but as a correspondence platform. I really love to write and receive letters.

The Elisabeth Remak-Honnef Center for Archival Research and Training (CART), established in 2014 at the UC Santa Cruz University Library, has trained dozens of graduate students in archives and exhibition work since its inception. In cultivating impactful learning experiences, CART develops students' archival research skills to support their career success, and increases access to unique Library resources for all.

Learn more about CART on our website.  

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License except where otherwise noted.

Land Acknowledgement

The land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from historical trauma.

The land acknowledgement used at UC Santa Cruz was developed in partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band Chairman and the Amah Mutsun Relearning Program at the UCSC Arboretum .

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Antisemitism Worldwide Report for 2023

Concern for the future of jewish life in the west.

The Annual Antisemitism Worldwide Report, published by Tel Aviv University and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), reveals that 2023 saw an increase of dozens of percentage points in the number of antisemitic incidents in Western countries in comparison to 2022. A particularly steep increase was recorded following the October 7 attacks, but the first nine months of 2023, before the war started, also witnessed a relative increase in the number of incidents in most countries with large Jewish minorities, including the United States, France, the UK, Australia, Italy, Brazil, and Mexico. 

"October 7th helped spread a fire that was already out of control," states the Report.

Link to the full report

Countries recording steep increases

According to the Report, in New York, the city with the largest Jewish population in the world, NYPD recorded 325 anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2023 in comparison to the 261 it recorded in 2022, LAPD recorded 165 in comparison to 86, and CPD 50 in comparison to 39. The ADL recorded 7,523 incidents in 2023 compared to 3,697 in 2022 (and according to a broader definition applied, it recorded 8,873); the number of assaults increased from 111 in 2022 to 161 in 2023 and of vandalism from 1,288 to 2,106. 

Other countries also saw dramatic increases in the number of antisemitic attacks, according to data collected by the Report from governmental agencies, law enforcement authorities, Jewish organizations, media, and fieldwork. 

In France, the number of incidents increased from 436 in 2022 to 1,676 in 2023 (the number of physical assaults increased from 43 to 85); in the UK from 1, 662 to 4,103 (physical assaults from 136 to 266); in Argentina from 427 to 598; in Germany from 2,639 to 3,614; in Brazil from 432 to 1,774; in South Africa from 68 to 207; in Mexico from 21 to 78; in the Netherlands from 69 to 154; in Italy from 241 to 454; and in Austria from 719 to 1,147. Australia recorded 622 antisemitic incidents in October and November 2023, in comparison to 79 during the same period in 2022.

Antisemitic incidents increased also before October 7th

While the dramatic increases in comparison to 2022 largely followed October 7, the Report emphasizes that most countries with large Jewish minorities saw relative increases also in the first nine months of 2023, before the war started. For example, in the United States, ADL data (based on the narrower definition for antisemitic incidents) point to an increase from 1,000 incidents in October-December 2022 to 3,976 in the same period in 2023, but also to an increase from 2,697 incidents between January-September 2022 to 3,547 in the same period in 2023 (NYPD registered a decrease in that period, while LAPD an increase). 

In France, the number of incidents during January-September 2023 increased to 434 from 329 during the same period in 2022; in Britain – from 1,270 to 1,404. In Australia, 371 incidents were recorded between January and September 2023, compared to 363 in the same period in 2022. On the other hand, Germany and Austria, where national programs for fighting antisemitism are applied, saw decreases.

Prof. Shavit: "Concern that the curtain will descend on Jewish life in the West"

According to Prof. Uriya Shavit, Head of The Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute , "The year is not 1938, not even 1933. Yet if current trends continue, the curtain will descend on the ability to lead Jewish lives in the West – to wear a Star of David, attend synagogues and community centers, send kids to Jewish schools, frequent a Jewish club on campus, or speak Hebrew".

Shavit said: "With bomb threats against synagogues becoming a daily occurrence, Jewish existence in the West is forced to fortify itself, and the more it does so, the more the sense of security and normalcy is undermined. What the fight against antisemitism needs now is efforts focused on the hubs of poison, and the presentation of measurable and attainable goals. Foremost, the reality in which big companies make big money by spreading big hate has to end".

Prof. Shavit added: "The reality is that Israel, as a state, is limited in what it can do for Jewish communities. But even the little that can be done is not done. Israel does not have a meaningful strategic plan for combatting antisemitism that is based on the needs of Jewish communities. The main contributions of the government are pompous statements and sporadic initiatives. Responsibility for combatting antisemitism should be delegated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose officials are professionals who know the Jewish communities firsthand. The Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combatting Antisemitism is redundant. A small example of just how much so: A few months ago, we noted in another report that the link provided on their website in English for reporting antisemitic incidents leads to an empty page. It made headlines in the media. And what happened? Nothing. No one bothered to fix it. It still leads to an empty page. There are no limits to the negligence and lack of professionalism".

According to Prof. Shavit, "one of the biggest challenges of our time is how to mobilize support for the fight against antisemitism without making it the definer of Jewish identity". 

Prof. Uriya Shavit.

ADL Head Greenblatt: "A Tsunami of Hate"

ADL’s CEO and National Director, Jonathan Greenblatt, said: "The aftermath of Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel on October 7th was followed by a tsunami of hate against Jewish communities worldwide. Unprecedented levels of antisemitism have surged globally in the streets of London, New York, Paris, Santiago, Johannesburg and beyond. This year’s report is incredibly alarming, with documented unprecedented levels of antisemitism, including in the US, where 2023 saw the highest number of antisemitic incidents in the US ever recorded by ADL. We are proud to partner with Tel Aviv University on this important annual report which will be used to inform governments and civil society and help push back against antisemitic trends".

In a special essay for the Report, Greenblatt wrote: "Antisemitism isn’t just an abstract issue. It is a real-life threat to Jewish life in America and Jews around the world, and our history teaches us that we do not have the luxury to be indifferent when moments like these occur. That means we need to be clear-eyed about the threats we face and have the determination to confront them".

An Emergency Plan by former Canadian Justice Minister

Former Canadian Justice Minister and Attorney General Irwin Cotler offers in the Report a historical and political analysis of the development of present-day antisemitism and a detailed 11-point plan for globally combatting the phenomenon. Cotler warns that “the explosion of antisemitism is a threat not only to Jews, but is toxic to our democracies, an assault on our common humanity, and a standing threat to human security – in a word, the bloodied canary in the mineshaft of global evil. Jews alone cannot combat it, let alone defeat it. What is required is a constituency of conscience – a whole of government, whole of society commitment and action to fight this oldest and most lethal of hatreds". 

The 150-page Report includes in-depth essays on different countries, as well as a study on the profiles of the spreaders of antisemitic content on X (formally Twitter). The essays examine, among other issues, the proliferation of antisemitic discourses in the Arab world, Turkey, and Iran following October 7 and trace their roots. The Report argues that "any future diplomatic negotiations must prioritize the uprooting of antisemitism from Arab societies".

"The fringes encroach on the political center"

The Report notes that hate speech was articulated already before Israel launched its campaign in Gaza, including on leading university campuses, and thus urged against seeing the recent wave of antisemitism as an emotional response to the war. "Some antisemitic attackers emphasize their problem is with Israel, not with Jews, and then attack Jews and Jewish institutions." 

Dr. Carl Yonker, Senior Researcher and Project Manager at the "Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry," TAU, who wrote a study for the Report on antisemitism in the United States, said: "Contrary to the conventional wisdom, post-October 7 incidents were also led from the far right in America. Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and others glorified Hamas and used the war to spread antisemitic propaganda along with conspiracy theories, according to which the crisis will advance the replacement of the white majority in the West by migrants from the Middle East. The fringes in the United States are encroaching on the political center from both right and left, making combatting antisemitism much trickier".

Scapegoating Jews in Russia

The Report notes the impossibility of reliably tracking antisemitic incidents in Russia at the present. An extensive essay in the Report examines the antisemitic rhetoric of the Russian dictator Putin and members of his regime. The Report notes that "At the beginning of 2023, the Chief Rabbi of Moscow in exile, Pinchas Goldschmidt, warned that Jews should leave Russia before they are scapegoated. Sadly, 2023 did not disprove the words of this wise and courageous religious leader."

On the part of Tel Aviv University, the Report was researched by the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry with the support of The Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Human Rights and Justice with the support of Richard and Elaine Dubrovsky and Sara Vered. 

See full Report here

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