‘Interrupting the Present’

A sense of repetition pervades contemporary South African political and cultural debate. Several recent studies have drawn attention to the fact that the renewed student protests since March 2015 parallel several features of the resistance and liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s. At a pivotal position between the two moments of political struggle stands the ‘miracle’ of the peaceful transition in 1994. Within this set of circumstances a group of curators, artists, and writers, Gabi Ngcobo and Kemang Wa Lehulere, amongst others, formed a collective under the name CHR (Center for Historical Reenactments) in Johannesburg in 2010. The CHR has pursued several questions that interrogate the complexity of a shared memory bridging segregated Apartheid legacy: how do readings of the past inform contemporary urgencies, and what are the political potentials of artistic interpretations of histories? How do they participate in the formation of new subjectivities?

Political Communications in the Public Sphere Student Protest in Indonesia 2019-2020

The government and the parliament have decided to pass problematic bills, such as the Corruption Eradication Commission Bill (RUU KPK), the Criminal Code Bill (RUU KUHP), and the Omnibus Law (RUU Cipta Kerja) into laws. The reasons behind the passage of the bills irto laws are to make bureaucracy easier and facilitate foreign investment inflows to Indonesia. However, the decision-making process failed to involve elements of the community, such as academics, workers, working class, press, and related stakeholders. Consequently, students staged rallies to protest against the passage of the bills into laws in 2019 – 2020. This researchuses an approach qualitative methodology with a critical paradigm. The goal of critical theory is to change a reality that is always unbalanced and dominated.This research tries to encourage change towards a better society and emancipations. The data analysis technique comprises analysis of information sources from the mass media and analysis of research documents. The results of this study find that students had two strategic political communications during the protest. First, the social media movement sent hash tagged messages such as #Reformasidikorupsi #Gejayanmemangil and #Mositidakpercaya. Second, student staged demonstrations in front of the Presidential Place and the House of Representatives Building. When the government and parliament conspire with oligarchs to make policies to maintain power, then conflicts of interest with society, and student protests will be inevitable. As a result, the students have declared a motion of no confidence for parliament in a non-parliamentary participatory democratic system.

What Now for the Zimbabwean Student Demonstrator? Online Activism and Its Challenges for University Students in A COVID-19 Lockdown

University student activism is generally characterized by protests and demonstrations by students who are reacting to social, political, and economic challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic revolutionized university student activism, and closed the geographical space for protests and demonstrations. The pandemic locked students out of the university campus, thus, rendering the traditional strategies of mass protests and demonstrations impossible. The COVID-19-induced lockdowns made it difficult, if not impossible, to mobilise for on-campus demonstrations and protests. It seems the pandemic is the last nail in the coffin of on-campus student protests. This theoretical paper uses a collective behaviour framework to explain the evolution of student activism in Zimbabwe, from the traditional on-campus politics to virtual activism. It discusses the challenges associated with cybernetic activism. The paper argues that, despite challenges, Zimbabwean university student activists need to migrate to a new world of digital technology and online activism. In the migration to online activism, students activists face a plethora of challenges. On top of the already existing obstacles, activists face new operational challenges related to trying to mobilise a constituency that has relocated to cyberspace. Student activists utilize the existing digital infrastructure to advance their politics, in spite of a hostile state security system and harsh economic environment, and other operational challenges.

New Social Movements as Postmodern Challanges To Neoliberalism and Representative Democracy

In this article, the relationship between new social movements, representative democracy and neoliberalism is examined. Starting with student protests in Europe and the United State, the late 1960s have witnessed the emegence of new social movements. Ecological, anti-nuclear, feminist, student, anti-racist, and LGBTI+ protests all have been examined with the scope of the new social movements paradigm. The remarkable protest wave of the 1970s has been followed by contemporary movements in different forms like the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Although these movements differ in terms of issues they deal with and goals they seek, they have a lot in common. Unlike the old movements like labour protests, these new movements primarily focus on postmaterial issues. Postmaterial identity demands and rights of these movements conflict with material demands of neoliberal governments. Furthermore, modern democracies fail to address these issues. Representative democracy is seen as an obstacle to political participation. On the other hand, postmodernism is a suitable concept to explain internal discrepancies and dispersion of new social movements. It is argued that (a) the legitimacy crisis of representative democracy and neoliberal response of capitalism to its structural crisis have triggered new social conflicts and movements, (b) these movements differ from old movements in terms of their forms, goals, and demands, (c) new social movements are postmodern.

Abolition Pedagogy

As the South African student movement of 2015–16 began to develop a deeper critique of the character of the transition out of apartheid and its minimal effect on the institutions of colonialism and apartheid, the administrators of postapartheid universities worked with the managers of the security infrastructure of the state to orchestrate a national police shutdown of the student and worker movement. This essay is an effort to sustain an objection to that coordinated effort, and to work through a proposal for how the new managers of the postapartheid state and university could have—should have—acted otherwise. This proposal is called abolition pedagogy, a refusal of the long-standing relationship between education and violence, and a reading of the pedagogic labor involved in antiviolence work. In the midst of the recent student protests, a 1969 exchange of letters between Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse—in which Adorno justifies his having “called the police” on the student movement in Germany—was used to justify calling the police on South African students some fifty years later. This article unpacks the citation, and uses Adorno's own commitment to critique as a “force field” to show up the limitations of his position, and to call for a different mode of engagement with the difficulties and possibilities of ongoing struggle. Adorno's “force field” is contrasted with his poor reckoning with jazz and his inability to see the work of critique in jazz and by implication in many other forms. Abolition pedagogy pursues a transformative orientation to histories of violence, asking how to sustain strategies for their unmaking.

„Chcecie totalnej wolności słowa?” Kultura w Niemczech u progu lat dwudziestych (XXI wieku) wobec radykalizmu, wielokulturowości i konfliktów etnicznych. Próba rozpoznania problemów

This article attempts to present selected phenomena of contemporary German culture in the context of political radicalism, multiculturalism and ethnic conflicts. Starting with the criticism of the student protests of 1968 (using the example of the novel Örtlich betäubt by Günter Grass) and discourses on Europe in the early 1990s (Grass, Enzensberger), and ending with debates on freedom of expression, political correctness or “cancel culture” (Wallraff, Pirinçci, Nuhr, Eckhart), this article analyses the consequences of left- and right-wing radicalism, anti-Semitism and Islamism for literature and cabaret in Germany on selected examples.

Między Kommune 1 a „niedzielną pieczenią”. Krautrock w świetle koncepcji komunizmu kwasowego

The article examines selected phenomena of the so-called krautrock, i.e. West German rock music of the late 1960s and the 1970s. The analysis is based on Mark Fisher's concept of acid communism and the related issue of collective subjectivity. The author distinguishes two opposing tendencies in the music discussed, the first one being the fascination with the collective that goes back to the student protests of 1967–1968, and the second one being the (re)appreciation of individual perspective, which manifested itself e.g. in an increased interest in spirituality and a certain kind of social criticism performed from a distanced position. Focusing on the relationship between the individual and the group, the article analyzes a number of songs and albums that have received little or no attention from researchers up to now.

Academics' conceptions of higher education decolonisation

The urgency for a decolonised university curriculum in South Africa, occasioned by student protests, demands interrogation of conceptions of decolonisation academic staff hold, seeing that the design and implementation of decolonised education rests largely with them. To determine the academics’ conceptions, the study adopted the interpretivist paradigm, using semi-structured interviews to solicit data from 13 purposively sampled academic staff at a South African university. Data analysis took a grounded analysis approach, where content analysed categories/themes emerged from the transcribed and coded data, not from apriori assumptions. Findings reflected both the conception of decolonisation as recentring and decentring. Findings also pointed to the ubiquitous use of the terms Africa and African(s) in defining decolonisation, conflating Afrocentric philosophy and Africanisation with decolonisation. Such findings represented the conception of decolonisation as a recentring of curriculum from the West to Africa as the centre. Other academics’ conceptions also represented a decentring of knowledge from Western hegemony without necessarily recentring it to African hegemony. Much advocacy was for achieving equality and parity between extant knowledges and hitherto marginalised local knowledges. There was also a manifest vacillation in respondents’ conception of decolonisation as they responded to the different questions, almost evincing a continuum between what can be termed a hard version and a soft version of the concept. The study recommends broader, intensive, institutional discussion of conceptual issues around curriculum decolonisation prior to implementation.issues around curriculum decolonisation prior to implementation.