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Centering Student Activism is a deep exploration of institutional responses to sexual assault. It addresses critical issues facing campuses today, examining how students navigate institutional dynamics and utilize the power of new and traditional rhetorical strategies to effect change. In doing so, it provides a profound understanding of the mechanisms by which coalitions can transform educational environments.

Centering Student Activism features a national interview-based study of contemporary student activists who deploy rhetorical strategies and tactics—old and new, embodied and digital—with agility and awareness. They aim their strategies and tactics of “intersectional rhetorical feminism” to interrupt and transform a sedimented culture. The students’ activism highlights not only the harms experienced by survivors in the aftermath of their assaults but also how their efforts to communicate those harms are often stymied or silenced by official responses and practices. These student activists pair interruption with rhetorical transformation as they seek to create a survivor-centric culture. In so doing they spotlight the systemic roots of sexual violence and respond to sexual assault through intersectional, coalition-based work.

Through detailed analysis and compelling narratives, Shari J. Stenberg underscores the importance of community care and mutual support in advocacy efforts. Centering Student Activism is an essential work for navigating institutional dynamics, providing an important resource to students, educators, and administrators who seek to understand how universities silence survivors and how students create ways to speak back and transform institutional culture.

This history of the Sandinista student movement is a window into the cultural milieu that produced a revolution where it seemed least likely to occur: among the youth of a country under the firm grip of a US-backed dictatorship whose power was secured by one of the best armed and most highly trained military forces in the region. By examining the articulation of political, gendered, and age-specific identities within the revolutionary process, Insurgent Youth sheds light on the everyday struggles of young Nicaraguans.

In the early 1970s a new emphasis on personal freedom and pleasure, under the influence of a global counterculture, challenged Sandinista gender ideology, especially masculinity, from within. This shift transformed the social world of Nicaraguan youth in general and Sandinista students in particular, eventually affecting the character of clandestine struggle and debates over revolutionary praxis within the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). Insurgent Youthshows how this new youth identity, which included the classic 1960s triumvirate of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll,” constituted a social vernacular among young Nicaraguans of all classes—a common language and array of social practices that ultimately aided FSLN recruitment efforts among working-class youth. At the same time, this new identity posed a danger to the movement in that it embodied a tacit questioning of both mainstream and Sandinista notions of gender and the political, bringing threatening class and ideological contradictions present within the movement to the surface.

Insurgent Youth places what was happening in Nicaragua into the context of the worldwide student movement, challenging patriarchy and colonialism in Latin America and across the globe. This deep dive into the Nicaraguan revolution and the youth culture surrounding it provides a unique perspective on, and understanding of, modern Latin American history.

In the months leading up to the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, students took to the streets, calling for greater democratization and decrying crackdowns on political resistance by the ruling PRI party. During a mass meeting held at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the Tlatelolco neighborhood, paramilitary forces opened fire on the gathering. The death toll from the massacre remains a contested number, ranging from an official count in the dozens to estimates in the hundreds by journalists and scholars. Rereading the legacy of this tragedy through diverse artistic-political interventions across the decades, Photopoetics at Tlatelolco explores the state’s dual repression—both the massacre’s crushing effects on the movement and the manipulation of cultural discourse and political thought in the aftermath.

Examining artifacts ranging from documentary photography and testimony to poetry, essays, chronicles, cinema, literary texts, video, and performance, Samuel Steinberg considers the broad photographic and photopoetic nature of modern witnessing as well as the specific elements of light (gunfire, flares, camera flashes) that ultimately defined the massacre. Steinberg also demonstrates the ways in which the labels of “massacre” and “sacrifice” inform contemporary perceptions of the state’s blatant and violent repression of unrest. With implications for similar processes throughout the rest of Latin America from the 1960s to the present day, Photopoetics at Tlatelolco provides a powerful new model for understanding the intersection of political history and cultural memory.

Positioning the events in the context of their time, Michael V. Metz delves into the lives and actions of activists at the center of the drama. A participant himself, Metz draws on interviews, archives, and newspaper records to show a movement born in demands for free speech, inspired by a movement for civil rights, and driven to the edge by a seemingly never-ending war. If the sudden burst of irrational violence baffled parents, administrators, and legislators, it seemed inevitable to students after years of official intransigence and disregard. Metz portrays campus protesters not as angry, militant extremists but as youthful citizens deeply engaged with grave moral issues, embodying the idealism, naiveté, and courage of a minority of a generation.

Students played a critical role in the Sandinista struggle in Nicaragua, helping to topple the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979—one of only two successful social revolutions in Cold War Latin America. Debunking misconceptions, Students of Revolution provides new evidence that groups of college and secondary-level students were instrumental in fostering a culture of insurrection—one in which societal groups, from elite housewives to rural laborers, came to see armed revolution as not only legitimate but necessary.

Drawing on student archives, state and university records, and oral histories, Claudia Rueda reveals the tactics by which young activists deployed their age, class, and gender to craft a heroic identity that justified their political participation and to help build cross-class movements that eventually paralyzed the country. Despite living under a dictatorship that sharply curtailed expression, these students gained status as future national leaders, helping to sanctify their right to protest and generating widespread outrage while they endured the regime’s repression. Students of Revolution thus highlights the aggressive young dissenters who became the vanguard of the opposition.

A poignant reckoning with the Marxism of a generation and its militant postcolonial intellectuals.

Arwa Salih was a member of the political bureau of the Egyptian Communist Workers Party, founded in the wake of the Arab–Israeli War and the vibrant Egyptian student movement of the early 1970s. Written more than a decade after Salih quit the party and left political life—and published shortly after she tragically took her own life—The Stillborn offers a devastatingly honest look at the tragic failure of both the national liberation and communist projects in Egypt.

This powerful, unflinching critique speaks not only to and about Salih’s own generation of left-wing activists, but also extends its gaze outward. The Stillborn addresses the broader, still fiercely salient dilemmas of revolutionary politics that continue to echo throughout the developing world in the postcolonial era.

Retrospectives of the 1960s routinely include the face of youth rebellion: long-haired students occupying campus buildings, young men burning draft cards, hippies dancing at Woodstock. In Younger Than That Now, Holly V. Scott explores how the idea of “youth” served as a tactic in the political and social activism of these years. In the early part of that decade, young white activists began to learn from the civil rights movement's defiance of racism. They examined their own lives and concluded that campus rules and the draft were repression as well. As a group, they were ripe for revolution, and their age gave them a unique perspective for understanding and protesting against injustice. In short, young people began to use their youth as a political strategy.

Some in the New Left were dubious of this strategy and asked how it might damage long-term progress. Young feminists and people of color were particularly quick to question the idea that age alone was enough to sustain a movement. And the media often presented young people as impulsive and naive, undermining their political legitimacy. In tracing how “youth” took on multiple meanings as the 1960s progressed, Scott demonstrates the power of this idea to both promote and hinder social change.