Journal of Student Affairs in Africa | Volume 10(2) 2022, 257-258 | 2307-6267   251

www.jsaa.ac.za
AFRICAN 
MINDS

CALL FOR PAPERS

Globalisation, Societies and Education Special Issue:  
Student activism, translocality, and social justice
Guest editors:  
Gritt B. Nielsen* and Thierry M. Luescher**

In many countries and universities, students engage in activities to promote social 
justice through inclusion, diversity, epistemic freedom and decolonisation, paying 
renewed attention to intersectionalities of race/ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality. In 
this special issue, we seek to focus on the translocal dimensions of student activism for 
equality and greater social justice. We understand ‘activism’ quite broadly to include 
student-led activities – ranging from small-scale mundane initiatives to large-scale 
protest events – that aim to change everyday life, practices or norms at the university 
and beyond. Students’ activist engagement is often shaped in and through translocal/
transnational/international/global spaces in which geo-political imaginaries, academic 
theories, actionable knowledge or symbols, hashtags, materiality and people circulate 
and move across socio-political contexts. Struggles are connected across multiple scales, 
and partially common worlds and horizons are created.

Furthermore, public debates and political interpretations of student engagement for 
social justice also tend to be shaped in and through translocal spaces. Student activism in 
one country is compared to and understood in light of the political situation elsewhere, 
giving rise to political pressure or decisions that can restrict or encourage student 
political engagement in different ways. 

This special issue offers an opportunity to explore the multiple ways in which 
translocal interconnectivities work to shape students’ political engagement to promote 
social justice within their universities and/or society writ large. 

There is a growing literature on transnational social movements, although literature 
on student movements tends to focus historically and currently on the national scale 
and/or on campus level activism. Similarly, while there is a growing literature on the 
role of the internet and social media in creating and sustaining translocal networks 
and solidarities in the form of networked social movements, thus facilitating translocal 
connective political action, literature on internet-age networked student movements 

*   Prof. Gritt B. Nielsen is Associate Professor in Educational Anthropology and Globalisation, DPU 
Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark. Email: gbn@edu.au.dk

**  Prof. Thierry Luescher is Strategic Lead in the Human Sciences Research Council, Cape Town, Adjunct 
Professor in the Chair of Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation, Nelson Mandela 
University, and a Research Fellow in Higher Education at the University of the Free State, South Africa. 
Email: tluescher@hsrc.ac.za

http://www.jsaa.ac.za


252   Journal of Student Affairs in Africa | Volume 10(2) 2022, 257-258 | 2307-6267

such as #FeesMustFall remains scant. Further analysis is also needed of the translocal 
dimensions of the more subtle forms of students’ everyday activism, including the ways 
in which negotiations over use of language or particular practices resonate with or are 
shaped by, for example, wider social movements, international academic literature or 
public debates. 

We invite contributions based on original empirical research that discuss the 
translocal dimensions of students’ political engagement. This can include, but is not 
restricted to, analyses of student activism in relation to:

• The role of social media, e.g. hashtag movements and campaigns, that resonate 
across institutional/national/local contexts

• Questions of epistemic (in)justice and how knowledge/curriculum is negotiated 
in relation to e.g. national/international/global contexts or standards

• The production of socio-political imaginaries and horizons (e.g. decolonial, 
anti-racist, anti-wokeist)

• Converging transnational social movements, including Black Lives Matter and 
#MeToo

• The shaping of policies, reforms, public debates within and across specific 
contexts.

• The incorporation/negotiation of particular kinds of vocabulary/ phrases/ 
languages that relate to a wider translocal (e.g. cultural, political, historical) 
context

Submissions can also engage in conceptual discussions and theorisation of the role of 
translocal interconnections in student movements, moving beyond dichotomies of 
global–local to concepts like global forms and assemblages, translocal/transnational, 
networks, diffusion, scale shift, internalization/externalization, scaling, worlding, 
resonance.

Submission process and important dates
Abstract deadline: 15 December 2022
Manuscript deadline: 15 June 2023

For details please contact the editors after you have consulted the journal website at: 
https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/cgse20.

https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/cgse20