Service and Philanthropy as College Student Activism for Fraternity and Sorority Members

College student activism is often thought of as a problem to be dealt with, focusing on the potentially damaging role that student protest can take on a campus. Activism, however, can be defined in a multitude of ways, including how students express themselves in their commitment to others. This notion of community service or service learning has taken on a major role on many college campuses, and can highlight the powerful and positive impact of student activism. This chapter explores the role of service and philanthropy as mechanisms for college students to express their beliefs and commitments to others. Specifically exploring those student behaviors in fraternities and sororities, activism among undergraduates can be a tremendous asset to an institution, to a community, and ultimately, to the students themselves.

Emotion, Efficacy, and Protest Intentions: Testing a Multilevel Dual Pathway Model of Collective Action

What are the causes of anger and efficacy, and their consequences for protest intentions? Here we propose a multilevel dual pathway model of collective action where anger and efficacy operate at multiple levels of analysis. To test our model, we administer a factorial survey experiment of student protest to a disproportionate stratified random sample of undergraduate students (N = 880). We find that the indirect effect of anger on protest intentions follows two routes—one dispositional and one situational—while the indirect effect of efficacy flows through a situational channel. We also find that the dual pathways of anger and efficacy are triggered by a broad set of situational conditions (incidental grievances, selective rewards and punishments, collective action frames, and size of the protest), while anger is also a function of a narrow set of dispositional factors (protest norms and attitudes). Our results imply that understanding the multilevel nature of anger and efficacy can help social movement organizations better coordinate collective action.

The decolonial turn: reference lists in PhD theses as markers of theoretical shift/stasis in media and journalism studies at selected South African universities

The supervision and production of a PhD thesis often presents a potentially interesting tension between PhDs as conforming to disciplinary epistemologies and PhDs as breaking epistemological boundaries. No academic discipline has been left untouched by decolonial thinking in the South African university space since the eruption of radicalized student protest movements in 2015. The Rhodes Must Fall student protest movement, which quickly morphed into Fees Must Fall, precipitated a new urgency to decolonize the university curriculum in post-apartheid South Africa. A new interdisciplinary conversation in the humanities and social sciences began to emerge which challenged established orthodoxies in favour of de-Westernizing, decolonizing and re-mooring epistemological and pedagogic practices away from Eurocentrism. Whether and how that theoretical ferment filtered into postgraduate students’ theses, however, remains to be established. This article deploys a decolonial theoretical framework to explore the tension between epistemic conformity and boundary transgressing in journalism studies by analysing reference lists of PhD theses submitted at three South African Universities three years after the protest movement Rhodes Must Fall. With specific focus on media and journalism studies as a discipline, this article argues that the PhD process represents a site for potential epistemic disobedience and disciplinary border-jumping, and for challenging the canonical insularity of Western theory in journalism studies. The findings appear to disconfirm the thesis that decolonial rhetoric has had a material influence so far on the media studies curriculum, as reflected in reference lists of cited works in their dissertations.

Talking About (My) Generation

This chapter engages with several major themes that have long animated research on the West German 1960s: protesters’ family backgrounds and wartime childhoods; the meaning of the Nazi past to their activism; and intergenerational relations. Like their student peers on the Left, centre-right activists had been raised in a post-genocidal society. Given that, how did they view and engage with Germany’s recent history of mass violence? The chapter highlights the centrality of anti-totalitarianism to their thinking. It also shows that, inspired by the so-called ‘‘45ers’ and nudged by social scientists who routinely portrayed student protest as a symptom of generational conflict, they began to think of themselves as a distinct generational community in the 1960s.

The Nearness of Youth: Spatial and Temporal Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes in Chile

ABSTRACT Social movement research indicates that mobilization can effect change in political attitudes, yet few works have systematically tested the effect of protests on public opinion. This article uses survey and protest event data to assess the spatial and temporal effect of mobilizations on political attitudes Chile. It combines the 2008, 2010, and 2012 LAPOP surveys and a dataset of college student protest events, mapping respondents and protests at the municipal level using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Using regression analyses, it finds that proximity to college student protests has a significant effect on various political attitudes. The effect, however, tends to be substantively larger on “weak” attitudes and smaller on “strong” ones. The results highlight the importance of mobilizations in shaping individual political attitudes and the role that social movements play in the policy-making process.