The youth is on the move! In recent years the youth has emerged as a significant social force through e.g. Fridays for Future and Black Lives Matter. During the covid pandemic the Swedish pupil-movement advanced as a great critic of distance education and its negative impact on students. Given the many great challenges in the Swedish school it is plausible that pupils will continue to act collectively to participate in the debate and influence the school politics.

Unfortunately, we experience a lack of general understanding regarding school youth as organized collective actors. This lack is in large due to insufficient historical knowledge about pupils’ collective coalitions. The dissertation addresses this shortage through a historical-sociological case study of the Swedish pupil-associations. The study focuses the emergence, claims and ideologies of the associations, as well as their conditions in relation to transformations within Swedish politics, school system and youth culture.