Abstract
During ten days in October 2015, students from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and eventually from across South Africa became engaged in the #FeesMustFall campaign, shutting down university campuses nationwide and participating in intense online and offline protest actions. The movement stopped increases of tuition fees for 2016 and eventually led to fee-free higher education for poor and working-class students from 2018. The extensive use of social media by student activists and others transformed the South African student movement into a networked movement. In this chapter, we provide systematic evidence of the online and offline life of #FeesMustFall. We analyze #FeesMustFall-related online and offline protest actions during the crucial first campaign from 14 to 23 October 2015. Using a combination of Twitter data, interviews with student activists, and protest event data, we analyze the history of #FeesMustFall, the nature and extent of Twitter use, the prevalence of protest action across different universities, and the online social network structure, leadership, and organization structure of the movement. We find significant differences between institutions that signal a social media divide in the movement as well as various organizational and tactical dimensions that may account for the effectiveness of the 2015 #FeesMustFall campaign.
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Acknowledging Note
This work is based on research supported in part by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa, Grant No. HSD180507326647, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Grant No. 1802–05,403. SDG.
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Luescher, T.M., Makhubu, N., Oppelt, T., Mokhema, S., Radasi, M.Z. (2021). Tweeting #FeesMustFall: The Online Life and Offline Protests of a Networked Student Movement. In: Cini, L., della Porta, D., Guzmán-Concha, C. (eds) Student Movements in Late Neoliberalism. Social Movements and Transformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75754-0_5
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