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Key research themes
1. How do student movements organize and mobilize to challenge educational and political inequalities?
This theme investigates the organizational dynamics, historical roots, and mobilization strategies of student protests aimed at addressing inequalities within education systems as well as broader political injustices. Understanding these factors is critical because it illuminates the mechanisms through which students transition from grievances to collective action and how they frame their demands within the socio-political context.
Key finding: The Chilean student movement of 2011 was propelled by a combination of long-term educational inequalities, political unresponsiveness, historic oppositional identities rooted in traditional student organizations, and... Read more
Key finding: Research reveals a divide between two key modes of student collective action: protest campaigns often framed as social movements, and formal student organizations engaged in policymaking. The analysis finds that formal... Read more
Key finding: Academic activism, including student protests, is conceptualized as a cultural act rooted in the social constructivist paradigm where students and academic communities struggle to re-create collective democratic and liberal... Read more
Key finding: A multiethnic student protest in the Bosnian High Vocational School (Jajce) emerged in response to governmental efforts to ethnically segregate the school, illustrating how students can mobilize across ethnic divisions to... Read more
Key finding: Student movements strategically employ two distinct forms of disruption: structural disruption within educational institutions through refusal to perform student roles (e.g., class boycotts), and invasive disruption targeting... Read more
2. What are the socio-political impacts and consequences of student protests on education systems and governance?
This theme explores how student protests affect educational institutions, public policies, and political processes, including how protests reshape collective values, administrative practices, and the responsiveness of political regimes. Analyzing these impacts reveals the reciprocal relationship between protests and institutional structures, highlighting challenges such as repression, bureaucratic responses, and politicization of education.
Key finding: Quantitative analysis shows that countries with higher proportions of students experience significantly more nonviolent protests, but this student population share is not associated with a corresponding increase in violent... Read more
Key finding: The 2021 South African political unrest severely disrupted education by damaging and looting over 139 schools in KwaZulu-Natal, leading to halted teaching and learning activities. The study underscores that political unrest... Read more
Key finding: Legislative reforms in Chile granting school principals expanded powers to suspend and expel students have been introduced to address school violence linked to student protests. However, the legal and procedural changes... Read more
Key finding: Through historical analysis, Ferguson demonstrates how student protests from the 1950s to 1970s led to increasing governmental and university administrative control, including bureaucratization and policing of campuses. This... Read more
Key finding: In contemporary authoritarian Russia, university student populations significantly correlate with larger anti-corruption protests. Individual-level data shows that university students participate in demonstrations at higher... Read more
3. How can computational and quantitative modeling enhance understanding and prediction of student protest emergence and dynamics?
This research area focuses on leveraging computational tools, particularly agent-based models (ABMs) and quantitative cross-national analyses, to simulate and empirically examine the micro-level behaviors and structural factors that contribute to the outbreak and escalation of student protests. Such methodologies enable scholars and administrators to identify behavioral patterns, network effects, and socio-political variables influencing protest likelihood and outcomes.
Key finding: Using an agent-based model, this study identifies grievance, social ties, political influence, sympathy, and perceived risks as critical micro-level factors determining the likelihood and scale of student protests in South... Read more
Key finding: Employing negative binomial and rare events logistic regressions across multiple countries, the study demonstrates that student population proportion robustly predicts frequency of nonviolent demonstrations but not violent... Read more
Key finding: Combining city-level event data with individual survey data from the European Values Survey, this study applies multinomial logistic regression to show that university student populations are statistically associated with... Read more
Key finding: Using representative panel data from the U.S. during the 2020 wave of protests, the study integrates demographic, attitudinal, and local contextual variables to analyze protest participation. The findings reveal that protest... Read more
Key finding: This work employs perhaps both qualitative and quantitative evidence to bridge gaps between social movement and organizational studies traditions in student activism research. It emphasizes the role of selection into higher... Read more