SOC072000 Archives

Voices for Change

Voices For Change is a groundbreaking history of environmental activism across the four nations of the UK since the early 1970s, revealed in first-hand testimony by some of those who were most closely involved. It highlights the lived experiences of generations of environmental campaigners engaged in a wide variety of protest, projects and policy during this period, from grassroots actions in local communities to the leadership of major national organisations. The book draws on a unique archive of one hundred in-depth life-history interviews with environmental campaigners involved in action on a wide range of concerns, from conservation and transport to energy and climate change. It situates the experience of activism biographically and historically, exploring the role of family, region, class, ethnicity, gender and generation in the lives of participants in the key campaigns of the period. The voices of campaigners whose contributions have never been widely recognised appear here, alongside some of the most high-profile, including Jonathan Porritt, Caroline Lucas, George Monbiot, Jane Goodall and Swampy. There are also links to hundreds of freely-available audio clips and associated transcripts from the interview archives. Together, these voices highlight the achievements and the challenges of activism across more than 50 years, revealing diverse and unsung stories from the movement. Through this focus on life stories, the book provides a vital resource for today’s environmental activists, throwing new light on the diverse origins, forms and impacts of their campaigns.

Critical Heritage and Social Justice

Critical Heritage and Social Justice brings together insights and experiences of scholars and practitioners working across heritage, museums, galleries, and cultural institutions to explore how principles of social justice can be embedded within these spaces. Bridging theoretical frameworks with practical applications, it presents a range of case studies and critical reflections that illuminate pathways toward transformative, justice-oriented heritage practices. Using Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional justice framework of redistribution, recognition, and representation, the book situates social justice at the heart of critical heritage studies, highlighting its intersections with urgent global challenges including the climate crisis, conflict, forced migration, and widening social, cultural and economic inequalities. All these issues demand inclusive, equitable and community-engaged approaches within the heritage sector.

Each chapter considers how to support communities, particularly those that are marginalised, by linking heritage to broader social justice struggles, addressing structural inequalities, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration, and fostering inclusive education and curatorial practices. Contributors from diverse disciplinary backgrounds – including anthropology, archaeology, architecture, conservation, education, science communication, and urban planning – offer rich, cross-sectoral perspectives. Through this collaborative and critically engaged approach, the volume articulates new conceptual and methodological directions for advancing social justice through heritage work, responding to the urgent demands of a fragmented and rapidly evolving world.

Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice

Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice is an edited volume grounded in a commitment to politically engaged research that moves beyond traditional scholarly forms. It examines knowledge that is often excluded from conventional academic production and explores the potential for creative critical writing and cultural production to advance social justice-focused research and practice. The book addresses hierarchies of knowledge creation and knowledge creators, bringing together artists, educators, community organisers, activists, researchers and writers working from decolonial, antiracist, queer and transfeminist perspectives.

The volume considers the role of storytelling and experimental, creative and often collaborative interventions across, between and beyond disciplines. Contributions include reflections on the uses of poetry in youth and climate justice work, conversational life stories as a research method in sociological studies of kinship formation, analysis of the potentials and pitfalls of centring researcher positionality and lived experience as a basis for scholarly analysis, relationality and the ethics of ethnographic work with radical political movements, speculative imaginings of the future of political organising and notions of rigour and care for the living and the dead in racialised archives.

Schooling for Refugee Children

Schooling for Refugee Children is a collaboration between five authors who explore their interactions with refugee children displaced from Syria to the Lebanese borders and London. Through a programme of carefully tailored research activities, they analyse the children’s representations of their personal journeys and current circumstances, especially with regard to ongoing schooling. The children’s experiences are expressed through their own words and drawings, disrupting the stereotype of children as ‘receivers’ rather than empowered actors, and challenging traditional solutions for improving schooling. Throughout, the children are eloquent about their schooling in the context of displacement. Their views and illustrations depict a keen awareness of social justice issues, including on the distribution of wealth, recognition of status and representation of voice. These are framed by the authors within Nancy Fraser’s concept of social justice as parity-of-participation. In this way, the book brings to light important representations of some empowering experiences lived through by refugee children from Syria, as well as their thoughts on what has helped their learning and what can be done better. The children’s need for care and a sense of belonging in their schools and new communities is given particular emphasis throughout the book, represented by one child, who simply requested, ‘Add some more love!’

Rent Strikes

Since the nineteenth century, working-class families have predominantly relied on tenements for housing, with rents often consuming a large portion of their household budgets. There is a long and contested history of tenants taking collective action across time and in many contexts, including their involvement in rent strikes, but international comparisons have been scarce. Rent Strikes: A history of collective tenant actions across the world is a collaborative effort by 16 contributors from diverse countries to identify common patterns and global trajectories in the rich history of tenants’ strikes, spanning a period of almost 120 years from the early twentieth century to the Covid-19 pandemic. It brings together local, national and comparative case studies to illustrate the history of tenant mobilisation for the general public, connecting with existing scholarship and laying the groundwork for future research. Adopting a transnational perspective, it examines episodes of tenant struggles in North and Latin America, Northern and Southern Europe, and Oceania. In doing so, the book explores a range of actions, including petitions, demonstrations, boycotts and legal actions, and has a special focus on the part played by women in these movements. The contributors examine the role of ethnic, national and gender differences between tenants and landlords, while situating their studies within a broader historical context and addressing the larger questions posed in the first chapter.