Towards a Capability-Informed Definition of Student Activism

In the previous chapters, I have presented the SRC, activist organiser and student-participant perspectives on their activism experiences. Students’ voices helped in identifying their valued political capabilities and functionings and the role of student agency freedoms in the pursuit of a just (i.e. capabilities- and agency-expanding) and democratic higher education. In this chapter, I set out to explain how and why the capability approach has been useful and offers a fresh perspective in understanding student activism experiences in expanding opportunities for social justice. The capability approach, as presented in Chap. 3 , emphasises substantive freedoms that enable individuals to be and do what they value, and to live the lives they want and hope for. These freedoms need to be understood in relation to their contribution towards individual and collective well-being. Additionally, the capability approach emphasises the role of agency and how people are active agents in the pursuit of what they have a reason to value. In this book, by bringing together SRC, activist organisers and student-participants voices, and using the capability approach lenses, the study emphasises how opportunity freedoms are either constrained or qualified by various contingent circumstances. These contingent circumstances can be either favourable or unfavourable, thus having an effect in the conversion of capability inputs in the pursuit of transformational change. As such, a capability-based social justice framework designed and developed in this book is a starting point in understanding lack of transformational change and I have provided, drawing from student voices, ideas of how justice and democracy might be enhanced within the university space. As such, I therefore conceptualise student activism as a space for forming valued political capabilities that advance student well-being. This matters as a contribution to citizenship and democratic life and reduces or dismantles Bohman’s (1996) concept of ‘political poverty’. Reflecting on the three empirical chapters, I theorise capabilities and student activism. In doing so, I present an argument for how and why the expansion of these political capabilities enhances the development of a meta-capability to transform. My reading of students’ voices suggests that, if we are concerned about transformation change, justice, student well-being, and advancing the notion of higher education institutions as a public good, spaces that enable students to raise and voice their concerns and being recognised as epistemic contributors have to be cultivated within the university space. Further, these spaces have to facilitate the conversion of such opportunities without consequences on their academic future as well as their future career paths. The chapter concludes by integrating the political capability sets, analysis of conversion factors and the role of agency to present a full capabilities framework for students’ political freedoms for justice, democracy, and transformational change within the university. Pulling all this together and returning to both Fraser (1996, 2009) and Fricker (2015), whose concepts of participatory parity and epistemic justice, which were raised in Chap. 3 , as potentially adding value within a capabilities framework, drawing too on the common political capability set and the meta-capability to transform in the higher education space discussed in the chapter, I conclude by proposing that additionally there are three overarching normative conditions of possibility which need to be in place for student activism to move in the direction of present- and futures-facing change.