Protest Practices: A Case Study of Students’ Collective Action in Italy,

This chapter presents the case of a group of students in Italy involved in an alternative small-scale form of political and cultural action, and explores its dynamics and limits. I explore the empowering potential of self-created spaces that enable university students’ participation in student action. I then discuss particular responses from the police, the municipality and civil society. I analyse two different episodes of forced removal of students from two different places in which they squatted. The findings presented come from the author’s ethnographic engagement (March 2017 to April 2018) with a group of 26 middle-class young university students from 19 to 26 years old (10 female and 16 male) in Milan, who squatted in an empty building near the University campus. They did this to create a new space of political and artistic action, sharing each other’s skills and information, and potentially involving all the students across the city. I conclude by suggesting how the student protest activities, when investigated according to a social practice approach, highlight the complex relations between student agency and the institutional power as co-constitutive elements of the very same protest practice