Open seminar at Score
The Organized Students: The Swedish School Student Movement’s National
Associations and Engagement in Educational Policy 1938–2005
This seminar, that builds on the work of my dissertation, examines the engagement of Sweden’s school student movement in education policy throughout the history of the democratic welfare era. It (the dissertation) focuses on the trajectories of the movement’s national formal student associations and analyzes, through sources produced by the organizations themselves, how the movement established and developed, which repertoires of influence and organizational principles it employed, and how its engagement was shaped by political opportunity structures within Swedish educational policy. The study draws on theories from social movement studies and sociology of organizations, and its methodology consists of an actorcentric, history from below approach. The results reveal a continuous, varied, and dynamic participation, complementing previous research on student collective action and associational life by empirically demonstrating an explicit form of political agency. The study underscores that student organizing has not only served as a means of sociocultural or democratic socialization, but has also constituted a concrete mode of political action. The analysis also highlights how membership-based organizations have been central to the specific form and actions of the school student movement in the Swedish context, thus challenging the notion that students merely engage politically through spontaneous or protest-based collective actions. Taken together, this dissertation provides valuable insights into the developments of Swedish education policy, seen from the perspective of a group that has traditionally been viewed as having limited formal power and constrained political resources.
