Articulating social justice: Student everyday activism and the cultivation of translocal consciousness

TY - JOUR

T1 - Articulating social justice:

T2 - Student everyday activism and the cultivation of translocal consciousness

AU - Nielsen, Gritt B.

PY - 2025

Y1 - 2025

N2 - This article focuses on students’ use of everyday activism to promote social justice at their university and in wider society. Drawing on empirical material from Denmark, it analyses how student everyday activism that targets seemingly ‘local’ practices or norms at a given university shape and is shaped by ‘more-than-local’ connections and perspectives. In their everyday activism (online and offline), the students work on themselves and others and make ‘structural inequalities’ visible by categorising and connecting place, socio-spatial positionality and global power inequalities. In doing so, they cultivate and come to see themselves as part of a wider translocal ‘consciousness’ – rather than a student movement – that revolves around universalising values of care, respect and a sense of responsibility for making the university and wider society more equitable. In this way, a focus on everyday activism, I argue, can offer important insights into dilemmas in social justice work: including the relation between particularising and universalising readings of inequality, essentialist and constructivist notions of identity and (socio-spatial) positionality, and negotiations over the boundaries between what is political and ‘beyond-political’.

AB - This article focuses on students’ use of everyday activism to promote social justice at their university and in wider society. Drawing on empirical material from Denmark, it analyses how student everyday activism that targets seemingly ‘local’ practices or norms at a given university shape and is shaped by ‘more-than-local’ connections and perspectives. In their everyday activism (online and offline), the students work on themselves and others and make ‘structural inequalities’ visible by categorising and connecting place, socio-spatial positionality and global power inequalities. In doing so, they cultivate and come to see themselves as part of a wider translocal ‘consciousness’ – rather than a student movement – that revolves around universalising values of care, respect and a sense of responsibility for making the university and wider society more equitable. In this way, a focus on everyday activism, I argue, can offer important insights into dilemmas in social justice work: including the relation between particularising and universalising readings of inequality, essentialist and constructivist notions of identity and (socio-spatial) positionality, and negotiations over the boundaries between what is political and ‘beyond-political’.

KW - everyday activism

KW - scaling

KW - social justice

KW - socio-spatial positionality

KW - student activism

KW - translocal articulations

KW - articulations

KW - scaling

KW - social justice

KW - socio-spatial positionality

KW - Student everyday activism

KW - translocal consciousness

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85217871909

U2 - 10.1080/14767724.2025.2459112

DO - 10.1080/14767724.2025.2459112

M3 - Journal article

SN - 1476-7724

JO - Globalisation, Societies and Education

JF - Globalisation, Societies and Education

ER -