Scaling student feminisms

Abstract

Ethnographically informed, this article examines the recent transnational feminist uprising by focusing on the Spanish student movement. Drawing on the contributions of the sociolinguistics of globalization and the pragmatics of scale, it gives an account of how feminist demands acquire intelligibility in the political agenda of the student movement based on a Madrilenian university, vis-a-vis the institutionalization of gender equality policies at university. Thus, by tracking the (un)making of political alliances over time between various coexisting centring institutions – spanning from university official authorities to forms of student grassroots institutionality – the article delves into the valuation processes of feminist scales and their competing logics of value-production, paying attention to how these processes get inscribed in the semiotic landscape.