The Ethics of Radical Student Activism: Social Justice, Democracy and Engagement Across Difference

Abstract

AbstractThis article focuses on student activism as an important site for the formulation and exploration of ethical dilemmas intrinsic to activist engagement across difference. In recent years, there has been a marked upsurge in student mobilization against inequality and social injustice within universities and in wider society. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork material generated with left-wing student activists in New Zealand in 2012 and 2015, the article investigates how two different student activist networks, in their struggles for equality and justice, navigate ethical dilemmas around inclusion and exclusion and balance universal moral claims against a sensitivity to situated ethical complexities and locally embedded experiences and values. While sharing the goal of fighting inequality, the two networks differ in their emphasis on the creation of ‘dissensus’ and ‘safe spaces’ in their network, their university and in wider society. The article draws upon two interconnected strands of theories, namely, debates about deliberative democracy, including questions of universal accessibility and inclusion/exclusion, and theories around ethics as a question of living up to universal moral imperatives (deontology) or as embedded in everyday negotiations and cultivations of virtues (virtue ethics). Inspired by Mansbridge, it proposes that central to radical student activism as an ethical practice is the ability to act as a (subaltern) counter public that not only ‘nags’ or haunts dominant moralities from the margins but also allows for the cultivation of spaces and identities within the activist networks that can ‘nag’ or haunt the networks’ own moral frames and virtues and goad them into action and new democratic experiments.