Tweeting #FeesMustFall - Chapter in book with Lorenzo Cini, Donatella della Porta and Cesar Guzman-Concha

 

Any moment now the book "Student Movements in Late Neoliberalism" must be published. It has been a while in the making! In fact, the process started with discussions during the 2017 conference on contentious student politics at the Scuola Normale Italiana in Florence. I was very privileged to give the keynote at that conference, which was organised by the eminent social movement scholar, Prof Donatella della Porta, from the Centre on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS). Two chapters in this book come from South Africa. The one is by Francesco Pontarelli who was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Johannesburg during the #OutsourcingMustFall / #FeesMustFall protests in 2015/16, and the other one is from my team here at the HSRC. 

Indeed, I had the pleasure of leading a whole team of junior and early career researchers to prepare with me this chapter, which comes from an interest that I have had since the early days of the #FeesMustFall movement, namely, the relationship between the online life and offline protesting. We never stop learning. The way we tried to trace this relationship in this chapter is by looking at the number of tweet events over time and the number of protest incidents. There are certainly much more sophisticated ways of doing this, and we are noting some of them. In our case, the mix of interview data, a protest event analysis and twitter data gives us an interesting mix to propose ways in which this relationship plays out. 

My honourable co-researchers and co-authors for this mini-project were: Nkululeko Makhubu (HSRC Master's Intern till February 2021);  Thelma Oppelt (HSRC PhD Intern till September 2020), Seipati Mokhema (HSRC Master's Intern till December 2021) and Zodwa Radasi (HSRC Postdoctoral fellow). 

The full book can be ordered here. And our chapter can be downloaded here.