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

• Main Author: Elísio Estanque
• Format: Article
• Language: Portuguese
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2010-05-01
• Series: Política & Sociedade
• Online Access: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/politica/article/view/13396

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.