Millbank tendency: the strengths and limitations of mediated protest ‘events’ in UK student activism cycles

UK students’ desire to create disruptive, media-friendly ‘events’ during the 2010-11 protests against fees and cuts is reflective of wider cycles and processes in student activism history. First, constant cohort turnover restricts students’ ability to convert campaigns into durable movements, necessitating that they must periodically ‘start from scratch’. This informs a second process, namely the need to gain the attention of mainstream media, as this can potentially amplify students’ grievances far beyond their own organisational capacities. Both have shaped student activism over the past fifty years, compelling contemporary students to create protest events that live up to their radical history. These processes were evident in autumn 2010, when an NUS demonstration saw students attack and briefly occupy Conservative Party headquarters at 30 Millbank. The protest’s mass mediation was central to activists’ ‘eventing’ processes, and provided the spark for the radical UK-wide campaign that followed. Yet once the fees bill was passed by Parliament, students’ dependency on mainstream media cycles was quickly exposed. With ‘mediatization’ tendencies having dogged student activism since the sixties, this article argues that creating ‘events’ epitomises students’ longstanding strengths and limitations as society’s ‘incipient intelligentsia’ (Rootes, 1980: 475)

Recovery in Mind: A Recovery College's journey through the Covid-19 pandemic.

INTRODUCTION: The Covid-19 restrictions of 2020-2021 are known to have undermined the UK population's mental health. Working alongside staff, peer trainers and students at Recovery in Mind (RiM), a Recovery College (RC) in West Berkshire, England, this mixed-methods study is amongst the first to investigate how an RC has responded to the pandemic. METHODS: Working in co-production with RiM staff and peer-trainers, this study employed a mixed-methods design, gathering Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS) well-being outcome measures by questionnaire and student experience, learning and co-production by interviews. FINDINGS: This research found that RiM continued to produce demonstrable improvements in student mental health. Students welcomed the way that RiM adapted to offering online and socially distanced provisions. Students valued the skills that RiM taught and the way that RiM courses reinforced prior learning; above this, however, they valued the mutual support and sense of community that participation provided. CONCLUSION: This study underlines the value of RCs maintaining 'hidden curriculums' of peer support and community involvement. This research emphasizes co-production as not only a tool for empowerment or service improvement but as a valuable skill for personal mental health recovery. Even when operating under the most unforeseen or challenging of conditions, RCs should always endeavour to prioritize and maintain co-production. PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION: In accordance with the RC ethos, this was an entirely co-produced study, with academic researchers and RiM staff and peer trainers working democratically in partnership with one another to design and manage the study and to write up and disseminate findings. To ensure the independence and rigour of findings, data analysis was undertaken by external academic researchers

Inequalities in students’ union leadership: the role of social networks

Drawing on a national survey of students’ union officers and staff, and a series of 24 focus groups involving both union officers and institutional senior managers, this article explores the characteristics of those who take up leadership roles in their (higher education) students’ union. We show that, in several areas – and particularly in relation to gender, ethnicity and age – union leaders do not represent well the diversity of the wider student body. In explaining these inequalities, we argue that friendship groups and other peer networks play a significant role in determining who does and does not take up leadership positions. Moreover, as friendship groups are often formed on the basis of ‘differential association’ and are thus frequently socially homogenous, inequalities tend to be perpetuated. Wider institutional cultures and societal norms are also implicated

Bottom-up Infrastructures: Aligning Politics and Technology in building a Wireless Community Network

Contemporary innovation in infrastructures is increasingly characterized by a close relationship between experts and lay people. This phenomenon has attracted the attention from a wide range of disciplines, including computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), science and technology studies (S&TS), organization studies and participatory design (PD). Connecting to this broad area of research, the article presents a qualitative case study concerning the building and maintenance of a grassroots, bottom-up information infrastructure in Italy, defined as wireless community network (WCN). Methodologically, the research is based on qualitative interviews with participants to the WCN, ethnographic observations and document analysis. The aim of the article is to understand the alignment between the technical work implied in building this bottom-up infrastructure and the political and cultural frameworks that move people to participate to this project. Relying on the field of science & technology studies, and in particular on the notions of ‘inverse infrastructure’ and ‘research in the wild’, we disclose the WCN’s peculiar innovation trajectory, localized outside conventional spaces of research and development. Overall, the presentation of the qualitative and ethnographic data allows to point out a more general reflection on bottom-up infrastructures and to enrich the academic debate concerning bottom-up infrastructuring work and other similar typologies of collaborative design projects in the domain of infrastructures