Manchester social movements conference, details

The only regular social movements conference in "these islands", and probably the best academic / activist SM conference in the global North...

 

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS CONFERENCE  - CALL FOR PAPERS

From 1995 to 2015, Manchester Metropolitan University hosted a series of very successful annual international conferences on 'ALTERNATIVE FUTURES and POPULAR PROTEST'.

We're very happy to announce that the Twenty First AF&PP Conference will be held between Monday 21st and Wednesday 23^rd March 2016.

The Conference rubric will remain as in previous years. The aim is to explore the dynamics of popular movements, along with the ideas which animate their activists and supporters and which contribute to shaping their fate.

Reflecting the inherent cross-disciplinary nature of the issues, previous participants (from over 60 countries) have come from such specialisms as sociology, politics, cultural studies, social psychology, economics,  history and geography.  The Manchester conferences have been notable for discovering a fruitful and friendly meeting ground between activism and academia.

PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite offers of papers relevant to the conference themes.  Papers should address such matters as: 

* contemporary and historical social movements and popular protests

* social movement theory

* utopias and experiments

* ideologies of collective action

* etc.

To offer a paper, please contact either of the conference convenors with a brief abstract:  

EITHER Colin Barker,  

email: c.barkerATmmu.ac.uk  

OR Mike Tyldesley, Politics Section, HPP,  

Manchester Metropolitan University  

Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamond Street West  

Manchester M15 6LL, England  

Tel: M. Tyldesley  0161 247 3460   

email: m.tyldesleyATmmu.ac.uk  

Fax: 0161 247 6769 (+44 161 247 6769)  

(Wherever possible, please use email, especially as Colin Barker is a retired gent. Surface mail and faxes should only be addressed to Mike Tyldesley)  

CONFERENCE PAPERS

One way we organise this particular conference is that we ask those giving papers to supply them in advance, for inclusion on a CD of the complete papers which will be available from the conference opening.

* Preferred method: send the paper to Colin Barker as an email attachment in MS Word. Any separate illustrations etc. should be sent separately, in .jpg format.

* if this is impossible, post a copy of the text to Mike Tyldesley on a CD disk in MS Word format

* Final date for receipt of abstracts: Monday 29^th February 2016

* Final date for receipt of actual papers: Monday 7th March 2016

These are final dates. The earlier we receive abstracts, and actual papers, the better.

CONFERENCE ARRANGEMENTS AND COSTS

The conference will run from lunch-time Monday 21st March 2016 until after lunch on Wednesday 23^rd March 2016. 

The conference cost will be inclusive of three lunches, teas/coffees and copies of the papers on CD. The full cost is £140.00, with a cost of £80.00 for students and the unwaged. We will circulate a Booking Form shortly.

To register, please go to https://www.kxregistration.mmu.ac.uk/AlternativeFutures2016 and complete and send the form. (If you have problems ‘clicking’ on this URL, cut and paste this address directly into your browser. Please contact Mike Tyldesley if you encounter any difficulties.) You will be given two options; “pay by Credit/Debit Card” or “Pay by Invoice”. If you use the “Pay by Invoice” option, please contact Mike Tyldesley (m.tyldesley AT mmu.ac.uk ) immediately after you complete the form to let him know that you have done so and discuss your payment method with him.

Hotels, hostels and dining out

We can supply information about relatively cheap local hotels and hostels. Let us know if you would like this information.

We cannot do hotel or hostel bookings for you.

Conference participants will be invited to dine together at two local (and not too expensive) restaurants on the two conference evenings. Payment for dinners should not be made in advance, but directly to the restaurants on the night.  

Please feel free to circulate this to anyone who might be interested.

Colin Barker

Mike Tyldesley

Noo Saro-Wiwa launches Ken Saro-Wiwa postgrad award

On 10 November 1995, the Nigerian military regime executed author, ecological and indigenous rights campaigner Ken Saro-Wiwa along with eight other activists on trumped-up charges. Their real crime was to oppose Shell's activities in the Niger Delta.

This November, on the 20th anniversary, the writer and journalist Noo Saro-Wiwa, daughter of Ken, will give a reading and launch the Ken Saro-Wiwa Postgraduate Award at Maynooth University. The award is funded by the royalties from Silence Would be Treason: Last Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa and supports postgraduate work on a theme relevant to Saro-Wiwa's life and work and which is likely to make a public contribution in keeping with his own practice. Award-winner Graham Kay's research looks at the race for oil at the turn of the twentieth century and how state policy in Britain and Germany became so closely tied to oil.

The issues for which Saro-Wiwa gave his life remain live ones today: Shell is running smug advertisements celebrating the forthcoming production on the Corrib gas field while they have been forced to abandon their drilling in the Arctic. Fracking and other drilling is being defeated in Northern Ireland while movement conflicts are intensifying in the runup to November's climate change talks in Paris. In the Niger Delta, conflict continues between Shell and the indigenous Ogoni population over how to implement the environmental clean-up of the damage caused by the oil industry over decades.




For more information and to reserve a place see this page.

Ken Saro-Wiwa letters now available online

 
Nigerian writer, environmental activist and indigenous rights campaigner Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed in 1995, together with 8 other activists, by the then military regime on behalf of the multinational oil companies. Saro-Wiwa's memory has been very important in Irish struggles, as the memorial to the "Ogoni Nine" at Bellanaboy, Co. Mayo testifies.

Saro-Wiwa's last letters, to Irish solidarity activist Sr Majella McCarron, were recently donated to NUI Maynooth and published in 2013 as Silence would be Treason: Last Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa (see reviews on OpenDemocracy and Red Pepper).

The letters themselves are now available online via the Digital Repository of Ireland (search for "Saro-Wiwa"). There is also an audio archive, including interviews with Ken's brother Owens Wiwa and Sr Majella, available online here.

The letters tell a remarkable story - a man on trial for his life, but with his political brain constantly active, thinking how best to take the struggle against Shell and the dictatorship forward at the same time as organising the campaign against his own execution.

Riot squad vs children, Bluebell, October 8th

This video from "Balbriggan and surrounding areas against austerity" shows local children sitting down in front of the riot squad in Bluebell (west Dublin). Solidarity Times writes

"Garda arrived after James Reilly, the ex Minister for Health was 'trapped' in Bluebell due to kids slow marching in front of the car chanting "James Reilly in Your Ivory tower this is called children's power".

The protest ended a short while ago after the "public order ran at the kids and terrified them and pushed some of us around .. They lined the road so the car could reverse out" Reilly is now the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, looks like he is doing a worse job of that then he did in health and thats saying something!"

This video from Veron Skvortsova shows the riot squad charging the children in order to allow Reilly to drive away.

In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell wrote

"When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on."

... and when we see actual flesh-and-blood children in conflict with the riot squad? On behalf of the Minister for Children?

Making sense of the Rising: the role of social science (public talk, Maynooth Nov 3rd)

The MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism at Maynooth and the MU Sociology cluster “Critical Political Thought, Activism and Alternative Futures” present

Making sense of the Rising: The role of social science

Public lecture by Donagh Davis

Amid widespread discussion of Ireland's 'decade of centenaries', one upcoming anniversary looms particularly large - that of the 1916 Rising. The legacy of the Rising has been famously controversial - charting a course from lynchpin of state-sponsored national memorialising up to the 1960s, to subsequently much more muted official commemoration - and at times bitter contestation - as the legacy of the Rising came to be seen as tainted by the armed struggle campaign of the Provisional IRA in the 1970s. With the Provisionals' war coming to an end via the Northern Peace Process, the coast was clear by the mid-2000s for government and establishment in the southern state to attempt to reclaim the legacy of 1916. However, it is not just the state that has displayed a newfound interest in the Rising. Tricolours and explicit references to 1916 are now ubiquitous at political demonstrations on apparently unrelated topics - such as opposition to water charges - in ways that would have seemed odd even a few years ago. References to the 'republic betrayed', and to the broken promises of the 1916 Proclamation, now percolate through anti-austerity discourse. Meanwhile, in spite of attempts at recuperation of the 1916 legacy by some elements of the establishment and mainstream political parties, the debate on 1916 within the intelligentsia has moved on little from the 'revisionism wars' of the 70s, 80s and 90s - with two sides polarised over the rights and wrongs of the Rising. While historians have been central to this debate, social scientists have played little role. Trying to set aside moralising questions of right and wrong, this talk will ask how social scientists can help make sense of the events of a hundred years ago. It will suggest that one way to do so is to strive for a more rigorous causal analysis of why the Rising happened, and precisely what effect it had on ensuing history. It will also be suggested that neither partition nor southern secession were inevitable prior to the Rising, but that the Rising initiated a path-dependent sequence that made these outcomes extremely difficult to avoid.

Donagh Davis is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin, and received his PhD from the European University Institute in 2015 for the thesis: “Infiltrating History: Structure and Agency in the Irish Independence Struggle, 1916-21”. His publications include: "What's so transformative about transformative events? Violence and temporality in Ireland's 1916 Rising" in Political Violence in Context: Time, Space and Milieu, edited by L. Bosi, N. Ó Dochartaigh and D. Pisiou (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2015); and "Revolution" in the Sage Encyclopedia of Modern Political Thought, edited by Gregory Claeys (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013).

Tuesday November 3^rd, 6 pm

Maynooth University, Callan Building, lecture hall CB7 (north campus)

Admission free – all welcome

CEESA website - new year, new look

As you can probably see, we've redesigned the website for the MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism. It took a bit of work to keep the old material but reorganise the site to make it more accessible - easier to read (we hope), a friendlier look, better structured and updated in various areas. Hopefully the site will carry on contributing to the conversation among social movement activists and community educators in Ireland and beyond.

Staying politically active without burning out

There's an interesting collection of workshop reports on this topic (and related ones, like how to involve new people in movements and what it looks like from the perspective of people who have been active for several decades) here. The background is German anarchism but the material is all in English.

Student organisers' handbook

Interesting (free, online) student organisers' handbook put together by UK anti-authoritarian activists.