Students Against the Crisis: Antecedents of the Anti-Austerity Mobilisations in Italian Schools and Universities

The current cycle of global contention needs to be conceptualised as an articulated set of different phenomenons, each one strongly connected to its own political, cultural and social context. Nevertheless, different episodes of mobilisation of the last few years share some common traits, in particular for what the most relevant European cases are concerned. In the last two years, anti-austerity mobilisations were central in shaping the public debate in many European countries, developing an articulated discourse on European policies, financial capitalism and the role of political elites in implementing the neo-liberal agenda. In this paper, based on critical discourse analysis of media content and on interviews to student activists, I analyse the Italian student mobilisation between 2008 and 2011 as an antecedent of the anti-austerity mobilisation, aiming at identifying continuities and legacies in terms of discourse, practices and repertoires of contention.