Student activism in an era of decolonization

Dan Hodgkinson, Luke Melchiorre and Marcia Schenck launch the Africa special issue: Student activism in an era of decolonization.

'The articles collected in this special issue, and first presented at a workshop entitled 'Student Activism Reconsidered' at the University of Oxford in July 2016, seek to develop understandings of African student activism during this critical period by revisiting postcolonial Africa's first student protests and experiences of university life. Many of the debates that these students initiated on campus would come, in subsequent decades, to be rearticulated on the national political stage through former students who went into prominent public positions or who set up or entered governing or opposition parties. As such, appreciating the ideas, behaviours and dreams that these people adopted during their university experiences can provide important insights into how they responded, as professionals and political leaders, to the challenges of economic crisis, structural adjustment and increasingly repressive authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s.'

Please note that, because of recording difficulties, the final portion of the seminar (by Marcia Schenck) is not included in this podcast. The full journal issue is available here (and Hodgkinson and Melchiorre's introduction is open access): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/africa/issue/450ED9F309972E6B034....