This formal session explores student and youth movements across a variety of regional contexts in the second half of the twentieth century. In many cases, these movements transcended borders to influenced each other and the world, contributing to a global, interconnected network of knowledge sharing and meaning making. They are also united by rhyming calls for anti-authoritarianism and social justice that involved taking stands against school administrations and national governments acting contrary to student interests.

The research shared in this panel is reinforced by presenters and other contributors’ firsthand experience with student organizing as well as a diverse array of regional perspectives spanning multiple continents. The cases span a wide spectrum of student movement tactics, from high-level advocacy for policy reforms to develop a stronger foundation for collective student mobilization through student government democracy to direct physical demonstrations against repressive state forces. In these cases, students faced persecution, violence, and death. Furthermore, these students’ activism and sacrifice are enmeshed within larger politics of the Cold War. These student movements were also embedded within intersectional layers of identity that allowed students to challenge prejudicial norms regarding race, ethnicity, gender, and language, among others.

This panel is put forward at a time when student voices are not only in great need, but are under threat. The twenty-first century has been marred by collapses of student governments around the world, including but not limited to the International Union of Students and the United States Student Association. Elsewhere, there are alarming trends of suppressing students’ right to assembly and abilities to organize collectively, replacing student-run structures with appointed student and youth councils that provide token advice to educational leaders and policymakers. With student democracy weakened, current student movements, despite the advances of the Internet and social media, are often isolated, ill-resourced, and uninformed about student movements’ rich history. We hope that this panel can help illustrate how student movements can transcend regional and national borders and that students have a better chance of enacting change when they work together and learn from each other as opposed to operating in divided pockets of resistance. We also hope that these papers can help raise awareness of student movement knowledge traditions by serving as a causal bridge between student movement surges in the mid-twentieth century and current student movements’ challenges so historians can develop understandings of why student organizations have experienced such retrenchment in recent decades. Understanding these long-term student movement trends would be particularly beneficial for education historians as well as education researchers and practitioners.