College Campus Activism 

 

Researcher Cassie L. Barnhardt, who is an Assistant Professor in Higher Education & Student Affairs at the University of Iowa, has written extensively about campus climate, student activism and civic engagement. In her paper, 'Campus-Based Organizing: Tactical Repertoires of Contemporary Student Movements.' (2014) she provides a history of student activism and paints a picture of how student activism has evolved over the ages. Using data collected by the US government about protests on campus as well as surveys from administrators from various college campuses, she compares how the methods of protest -- sit-ins versus marches, for example -- have changed over time. Barnhardt uses this information to analyse how the response to student activism can change over time -- from something problematic to "deal with" to an important aspect of learning that fosters civic engagement.

 

In another paper, titled 'Contemporary Student Activism: the Educational contexts of socially-responsible civic engagement', Barnhardt argues, using data from over a 100 colleges across America, that college campuses with diverse educational requirements have higher incidents of mobilisation. She also argues that these students tend to organise around movements of educational and symbolic importance, and often see this activism as an extension of their identities.​

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Barnhardt's work can help us understand WTU and FFS as student movements, and how Stanford's unique environment fosters their rhetoric and repertoire of action. It also explains why the campaigns often had such a large focus on identity -- because according to Barnhardt, that is the most common motivator for students to get involved in a protest. 

Barnhardt also sheds some light on how these groups could be perceived by the administrators they are trying to reach, and this new research on FFS and WTU, and recent coverage of the administrations' response to the protests, complicates her work by evoking the question of whether campus activism is going back to being treated as a nuisance, as it was in the 90's (Barnhardt).
 

 

Digital Communication

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The work of researchers Michaela D.E. Meyer and Connie Workman Bray in their paper, 'Emerging Adult Usage of Social Networks as Sites of Activism: A Critical Examination of the TOMS and TWLOHA Movements' reveals interesting insights into how people view online communication, and how the meaning of participation changes when the activism efforts are online. One of their findings -- that in the online context it is important to distinguish between awareness and activism, is especially useful to this project, when trying to measure the success of WTU and FFS. That is. why this project looks at three measures for engagement: the number who saw the groups, the number who agreed, and lastly, the number who participated.

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This nuanced understanding of engagement in digital communication also comes from the paper "Terms of Engagement: Analyzing Public Engagement with Organizations Through Social Media" by Brian G. Smith and Tiffany Derville Gallicano, researchers from Purdue University and University of North Carolina respectively. Their paper was written in response to the sense that there is a lot of ambiguity that surrounds the term engagement when used online, and to be measurable, it had to be pinned down to a definition. It is their work that motivated the three measures of engagement used in this project.

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Activist Communication

 

The problem of activism is explored in the book, 'Making the news: A guide for activists and nonprofits' by Jason Salzman, a media critic, blogger and activist who has been making the news for his protests since he was 8 years old. In the book, Salzman writes that activists don't have the money to compete with corporations, and like researcher James Hamilton concludes that activists start from a distinct position of disadvantage in the race to get people's attention. Salzman proposes solutions to this problem which he characterises as 'guerrilla activism', and provides activists with a repertoire of disruptive campaign strategies, and theorises that for underfunded movements not getting a lot of attention, these strategies are the best way to make a difference. This is interesting in the context of WTU and FFS as they both used disruptive protests,  and as Salzman predicted, both garnered media interest. As the Stanford survey shows, FFS was more successful than WTU at being memorable, and in context of Salzman this could be chalked up to FFS's sit-in, which was a disruptive protest technique. 

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The paper, 'Online networks of student protest: the case of the living wage campaign' by researchers J Patrick Biddix, of Valdosta State University and Han Woo Park, of Yeungnam University (South Korea) explores how digital communication has altered student activism. In their paper they discuss the importance of understanding social networks to understanding these protests and illustrate that student protests today rely heavily on online communication to spread their message, and that the previous disadvantages of student protests --for example, the rate at which students leave the campaign due to graduation -- can be mitigated through online communities created by shared causes.

This research is also interesting because it shows how there is a new way for activists to create a history of language for their protests, and that online communication can be both a medium and a witness, and each function can augment the other.

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