Youth, bohemia and social movements: student cultures and struggles at the University of Coimbra.

Abstract

This text takes up some of its author’s recent work on student youth in

Coimbra. Centered around the Coimbra university environment and an

academic tradition of over 700 years of history, its primary objective is

to question some current tendencies among university students, through

the acute gaze of a professor who has been involved in the student and

daily life of the city for over 20 years. It attempts to identify subjectivities,

participatory logics and attitudes of indifference/demarcation among different

segments of the student population. More than a phenomenological

register of daily life in academia, the text is meant to capture of the past and the ways in which they can (or cannot) be appropriated

by the current generation of students. On the other hand, the profound

changes of recent decades, both in Portugal itself and within the Portuguese

higher educational system, have reoriented behavior, expectations

and forms of action of the current university population, encouraging its

distancing with regard to this past and a ‘forgetting’ of the meaning of the

social movements which during the 1960s contributed to undermining the

Salazar and Caetano dictatorship. The reflections that are proposed here

attempt to explain this phenomenon, while at the same time looking at

this particular context as an expression of other more general phenomena

that affect Portugal and the European democracies as a whole today.

Keywords: youth, university, Coimbra, students, student movement, social

movements, tradition, bohemia.