Strike versus Boycott: discursive repertoires and contention in the 2012 Quebec student strike

ABSTRACT

Protesting government tuition increases in 2012, Quebec university and college students participated in collective action that they contentiously characterized as a ‘strike.’ While oppositional actors insisted students were boycotting classes – not striking – student activists claimed legal and cultural justifications for their action. This paper asks: How did Quebec student activists discursively characterize and legitimize their protest tactic as a strike? How did this discourse – and opponents’ counter-discourse – structure the terms of the debate within higher education institutions? Using discourse analysis of student newspapers and organizers’ first-hand accounts of the strike, this paper argues that striking students developed a discursive repertoire constituted by two components: they linked their action to a collective identity with a historical legacy of striking and adopted collective action frames that characterized the action as disruptive and collective. While the debate within higher education institutions centred around legitimacy, it was deeply rooted in contestation over individualism versus collectivism and the ongoing neo-liberalization of higher education. Through the case of the 2012 student strike, I propose employing collective identity and collective action frames together in a dialogic framework of discursive repertoires, thereby providing analytical clarity to this concept for social movement scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse
• framing
• collective identity
• contention
• strike
• student movement

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the editor and reviewers for their thoughtful feedback on my manuscript. Special appreciation also goes to Zach Richer for his constructive comments on an early draft of this paper, and to Ellen Berrey for her consistent support and thoughtful feedback at every stage of its development, including our extensive discussions on the nuances of the ‘strike’ versus ‘boycott’ discourse. Additionally, I would like to thank my Francophone colleagues whose experiential knowledge of the 2012 strike contributed invaluable insights to this paper.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Kristen Bass

Kristen Bass is a PhD Student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Broadly, her research interests include inequality, social movements, labour and work, and the environment. Her dissertation will explore the experiences of Canadian workers in the context of climate change and the transition to a low-carbon economy.