What do you think?
Rate this book
Springtime: The New Student Rebellions
The autumn and winter of 2010 saw an unprecedented wave of student protests across the UK, in response to the coalition government’s savage cuts in state funding for higher education, cuts which formed the basis for an ideological attack on the nature of education itself. Involving universities and schools, occupations, sit-ins and demonstrations, these protests spread with remarkable speed. Rather than a series of isolated incidents, they formed part of a growing movement that spans much of the Western world and is now spreading into North Africa. Ever since the Wall Street crash of 2008 there has been increasing social and political turbulence in the heartlands of capital.
From the US to Europe, students have been in the vanguard of protest against their governments’ harsh austerity measures. Tracing these worldwide protests, this new book explores how the protests spread and how they were organized, through the unprecedented use of social networking media such as Facebook and Twitter. It looks, too, at events on the ground, the demonstrations, and the police kettling, cavalry charges and violent assault.
From Athens to Rome, San Francisco to London and, most recently, Tunis, this new book looks at how the new student protests developed into a strong and challenging movement that demands another way to run the world. Consisting largely of the voices that participated in the struggle, Springtime will become an essential point of reference as the uprising continues.
From the US to Europe, students have been in the vanguard of protest against their governments’ harsh austerity measures. Tracing these worldwide protests, this new book explores how the protests spread and how they were organized, through the unprecedented use of social networking media such as Facebook and Twitter. It looks, too, at events on the ground, the demonstrations, and the police kettling, cavalry charges and violent assault.
From Athens to Rome, San Francisco to London and, most recently, Tunis, this new book looks at how the new student protests developed into a strong and challenging movement that demands another way to run the world. Consisting largely of the voices that participated in the struggle, Springtime will become an essential point of reference as the uprising continues.
296 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
4 people are currently reading
87 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 19, 2011
Some years ago while I was staying in a small hotel in the Rue des ecoles in Paris’s 5th I asked the owner about a student protest I’d seen at the technical college just down the road: his reply was slightly contemptuous Parisian shrug and the comment that they were students – as if there needed to be no other explanation. The same week I joined a protest of several hundred thousand against one of Israel’s recurrent attacks on Gaza, and saw the Parisian police attacking and harassing people who had taken time out from the march to pray – there were enough of us that there was still a march going by when prayers ended.
These two vignettes came back to me several times as I read this collection partly of first hand, from the street, reports of European, North African and US-based student related protest activities in late 2010 and early 2011 and partly of wider and longer term analyses. They were two small moments in decades of protest watching and participating that reminded me of the ambiguous views often held of youthful (and not so youthful) protests, even more so in the context of the late 2011 Occupy protests which are widespread, widely supported and seem for the most part to lack specific demands. There is however little doubt that the revival of active protest in 2010/11 is a sign of growing dissatisfaction with responses to the global financial crisis since 2008, the business-as-usual approach of conservative, liberal and social democratic governments, and the efforts of those governments to draw even more of our social and cultural lives into commercialised and commercialising market forces – in the UK, North America, Italy, France and Greece we saw students from universities, further education and high schools mount spirited protests against those policies and the effects they are having on access too and the content of education as well as the conditions of life for students, recent graduates and young people.
Much of the response we saw at the time was akin to that of my Parisian hotelier – ‘they’re students, that’s what they do’ – followed by condemnation of many of the activists, even more so when the protests resulted in damage to property; seemingly of greater concern than damage to protestors such as the young man in London badly beaten around the head by the police who only got his life saving surgery because hospital staff defied police instructions about where he should be treated. There is much about his collection that helps rectify that contempt, and we get to see and hear the experiences of the insiders, the young people at the centre of these struggles, where in Britain at least university students protesting against fee rises of up to 300% are not acting out of self interest – the new fees apply only to new students, not existing ones.
Despite this rectification, the collection is uneven and in some cases the views-from-the-street needed more contextualisation, especially the British material which seems to make some assumptions about how much readers might know about the events in question – a series of spectacular and large protests in November and December 2010. It may be that this is the product of the editors’ links or closeness to these events; both are London-based and Solomon was President of the University of London (student) Union and a key organiser of the London protests; it may also be a product of speed given that the book was available within about two months of the last events considered. The other material – drawn from Italy, the USA, France, Greece and Tunisia – includes more analytical and contextual material, and in the case of the Italian material a superb critical evaluation of the Europe-wide reforms of higher education now known as the ‘Bologna Process’ in the form of ‘The Factory of Precarious Workers’, an extract from Giulio Calella’s 2008 book L’onda anomala: Alla ricerca dell’autopolitica (which not reading Italian I’ve not read), a welcome translation to English and addition to English-language debates about education and contemporary labour markets.
The inclusion of the Tunisian material points to one of the paradoxes of contemptuous responses to youth protest – condemn it at home, but be more ambivalent abroad. Unlike the risings in Libya and Syria, however, the democratic movement in Tunisia (and Egypt) presented western governments with a problem in that these regimes (Mubarak & Ben Ali) were allies. There is therefore focused criticism of the role of the French government (including Sarkozy) in efforts to shore up Ben Ali – again, not a critique we heard much about in the English-speaking world and a welcome enhancement of our understanding of those momentous events.
In short, then, this is an uneven collection that seeks not so much to explore and analyse recent student-centred protest events but to report them, to provide us with a critical chronicle. In this, Solomon and Palmieri have succeeded admirably and while the book may not have great staying power it does provide us with an impressive set of material, some not otherwise available in English, that helps us make sense of one key aspect of contemporary politics and the responses to government policies and actions. What is more, most of the extracts are short (none more than about 10 pages), sharp and for the most part pithy.
These two vignettes came back to me several times as I read this collection partly of first hand, from the street, reports of European, North African and US-based student related protest activities in late 2010 and early 2011 and partly of wider and longer term analyses. They were two small moments in decades of protest watching and participating that reminded me of the ambiguous views often held of youthful (and not so youthful) protests, even more so in the context of the late 2011 Occupy protests which are widespread, widely supported and seem for the most part to lack specific demands. There is however little doubt that the revival of active protest in 2010/11 is a sign of growing dissatisfaction with responses to the global financial crisis since 2008, the business-as-usual approach of conservative, liberal and social democratic governments, and the efforts of those governments to draw even more of our social and cultural lives into commercialised and commercialising market forces – in the UK, North America, Italy, France and Greece we saw students from universities, further education and high schools mount spirited protests against those policies and the effects they are having on access too and the content of education as well as the conditions of life for students, recent graduates and young people.
Much of the response we saw at the time was akin to that of my Parisian hotelier – ‘they’re students, that’s what they do’ – followed by condemnation of many of the activists, even more so when the protests resulted in damage to property; seemingly of greater concern than damage to protestors such as the young man in London badly beaten around the head by the police who only got his life saving surgery because hospital staff defied police instructions about where he should be treated. There is much about his collection that helps rectify that contempt, and we get to see and hear the experiences of the insiders, the young people at the centre of these struggles, where in Britain at least university students protesting against fee rises of up to 300% are not acting out of self interest – the new fees apply only to new students, not existing ones.
Despite this rectification, the collection is uneven and in some cases the views-from-the-street needed more contextualisation, especially the British material which seems to make some assumptions about how much readers might know about the events in question – a series of spectacular and large protests in November and December 2010. It may be that this is the product of the editors’ links or closeness to these events; both are London-based and Solomon was President of the University of London (student) Union and a key organiser of the London protests; it may also be a product of speed given that the book was available within about two months of the last events considered. The other material – drawn from Italy, the USA, France, Greece and Tunisia – includes more analytical and contextual material, and in the case of the Italian material a superb critical evaluation of the Europe-wide reforms of higher education now known as the ‘Bologna Process’ in the form of ‘The Factory of Precarious Workers’, an extract from Giulio Calella’s 2008 book L’onda anomala: Alla ricerca dell’autopolitica (which not reading Italian I’ve not read), a welcome translation to English and addition to English-language debates about education and contemporary labour markets.
The inclusion of the Tunisian material points to one of the paradoxes of contemptuous responses to youth protest – condemn it at home, but be more ambivalent abroad. Unlike the risings in Libya and Syria, however, the democratic movement in Tunisia (and Egypt) presented western governments with a problem in that these regimes (Mubarak & Ben Ali) were allies. There is therefore focused criticism of the role of the French government (including Sarkozy) in efforts to shore up Ben Ali – again, not a critique we heard much about in the English-speaking world and a welcome enhancement of our understanding of those momentous events.
In short, then, this is an uneven collection that seeks not so much to explore and analyse recent student-centred protest events but to report them, to provide us with a critical chronicle. In this, Solomon and Palmieri have succeeded admirably and while the book may not have great staying power it does provide us with an impressive set of material, some not otherwise available in English, that helps us make sense of one key aspect of contemporary politics and the responses to government policies and actions. What is more, most of the extracts are short (none more than about 10 pages), sharp and for the most part pithy.
April 20, 2015
Stirs the blood and gives some inspiration to a politically awakened university student :) provides excellent historical context and critical writing. Bloody amazing book, a must read
December 23, 2024
Uneven level, but mostly rather boring. Probably a better read if you're a very young person. Extremely depressing from a '24 perspective.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews