Dr. Tom Junes will present his research proposal on the topic: "Student Protest in Bulgaria Revisited: The University Occupation Strikes and the Anti-government Rallies of 2013-2014" on 17 November 2016 (Thursday) at 16:30h at CAS Conference Hall.

Abstract:

My talk will be based on a planned book project which deals with student protest in Eastern Europe from the late 1980s to 2015. The book project covers student protest activity during the anti-communist revolutions, the later post-communist protest movements and colour revolutions, and concludes with student movements in the region during the so-called global protest wave that started in 2008. Following a general outline of the book project by way of introduction, my talk will focus on one of the specific case studies i.e. the student protest movement that appeared in Bulgaria in October 2013 and resulted in a three-month-long university occupation strike which was part of the broader anti-government protests of 2013-2014. Apart from chronicling the student protest movement as it appeared and related to the broader protest movement in 2013-2014, the talk will venture into certain thematic aspects of the student occupation strike. I will discuss the protest repertoire, the organisational problems and goals of the movement, and how students perceived themselves as political activists and actors within the movement. Subsequently, I will assess this Bulgarian case study within a comparative historical framework of previous student protests in Bulgaria, most notably in 1990 and 1997. I will also place the Bulgarian case within a broader contemporary international context in order to gauge to what degree #OccupySU was sui generis and to what extent it showed similarities with or differed from the student protests in Ukraine and Macedonia. Finally, I will return to the main questions of my research for the book project in order to reflect on the Bulgarian student occupation of 2013-2014 within the broader debate on (youth) protests in Eastern Europe and elsewhere around the globe.