‘There is no alternative?’: challenging dominant understandings of youth politics in late modernity through a case study of the 2010 UK student occupation movement

Abstract

Utilising an in-depth case study of a student occupation at Newcastle University as its focus, this article makes a critical appraisal of Beck, Giddens and Inglehart's ideas about youth and political agency in late modernity. In short, we argue that when considering the case of the 2010 UK student occupation movement, dominant theoretical thinking about young peoples' politics overemphasises the importance of individualism and ‘lifestyle politics’ and is premised on a somewhat uncritical philosophical approach towards youth's collective ability to self-organise for social change in the modern world. Interview data from our case study highlight the importance of collective reflexivity in the student movement, the merging of so called ‘materialist’ and ‘post-materialist’ political values and the importance of both physical and virtual spaces for youth activism.

Keywords:

• collectivism
• occupation
• politics
• space
• student-movement

Notes

This article is dedicated to the memory of student activist Patrick Rolfe (1987–2011).

1. For example, see http://thegreatunrest.net/2010/12/

2. It should be mentioned here that this neo-liberal agenda of cutting public expenditure and introducing market principles into state services like education is not something completely new, but was a key feature of Conservative government policy during the 1980s under ‘Thatcherism’ (see Hall and Jacques 1983 for a general discussion and CCCS Education Group 1991 for an analyses of these policies on FE and HE at the time), when the term ‘there is no alternative’ was coined. However, despite many similarities, all historical periods have their own specific sets of economic and political conditions – the banking crisis of 2008 and the fact that there is a Coalition government now rather than simply a revived Thatcherism are two different factors to consider in the analyses. For example the Liberal Democrats have been credited with raising the issue of equal access to HE and making some policy concessions regarding no upfront fees, bursaries for poorer students, and raising the threshold of paying back student loans. At the same time, the banking crisis has appeared to make all political parties accept the logic of austerity to some extent, including Labour, which means there is little formal political opposition to current education policies in HE, hence we revive the term ‘there is no alternative’ here to characterise current Coalition thinking as well.

3. The ‘fishbowl’ was a foyer area outside of the main occupied lecture theatre where meetings sometimes happened.