Abstract
This thesis analysed digitised student newspapers from 1969 to 2019 to argue that student political activism never disappeared on British campuses, it evolved. This research contributed to growing bodies of knowledge exploring student activism in the post-sixties context, demonstrating students continued to be politically active after 1969. Contextualising the research, Philip Altbach argued “Student political activism is a highly complex, multi-faceted phenomenon”.1 The research defined student political activism within a binary: direct and indirect activism. Bridging the gap between history and journalism, the thesis adopted an interdisciplinary approach to understand the impact of the NUS, student finance, the LGBT community and anti-racism. With Black, Pemberton and Thane stating journalism acts as a “first draft of history”,2 the interdisciplinarity of the thesis explored narratives of student political activism from the students’ perspective. Utilising methods and tools from across the Digital Humanities, the research highlighted how student press can communicate and disseminate activist information, as well as chronicle student movements.Through an inductive reflexive thematic analysis (TA) of student newspapers from Imperial College Union (Felix), Newcastle University Union (The Courier), and Leeds University Union (the Leeds Student, also known as the Union News in the 1969 results and The Gryphon after 2014), the research evidenced through its mixed methods approach the evolution of student political activism. The quantitative results illustrated that, over time, there was a decline in front-page references to student movements, a decline in references to protests and strikes, and an increase in references to campaigns. The qualitative results highlighted student communities fought on and off campuses to achieve direct and indirect successes. Whilst the sixties were widely regarded as unprecedented, student histories in the primary research highlighted the ever-present political mindsets on British university campuses between 1969 and 2019. The longitudinal approach in the thesis provided contexts around the rise and fall of student movements.
1 Philip G. Altbach, “Perspectives on Student Political Activism.” Comparative Education 25, no. 1 (1989): 97–110. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3099006.
2 Lawrence Black, Hugh Pemberton and Pat Thane, Reassessing 1970s Britain. (Manchester University Press: 2013). The authors argued journalism in the seventies provided a very narrow view of Britain. Considering the power of national media, this would have undoubtedly skewed the interpretation of society at the time by the public.
The thesis highlighted the importance of including student voices in the construction of narratives around student political activism. By understanding individual experiences and the collective will to fight in Higher Education (HE), the thesis’ contribution was threefold. The scholarly contribution comes from the addition of student voices into literature on post-sixties activism, which has historically been under researched. The methodological contribution comes from combining NVivo and Excel, which provided the basis for mining content and performing statistical analyses, to understand the evolution of student political activism. Empirically, the research visualised and highlighted the argument that students have fought to survive in Higher Education, most pertinently by adding the inclusion of student reporting into narratives on political participation.
| Date of Award | 9 Jun 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Jodi Burkett (Supervisor) & James Dennis (Supervisor) |