Activism 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.

Postdigital Intimacies

Postdigital Intimacies presents a unique and timely collection of research into the complex interplay and entanglement between digital and analogue relationships. Set within the normalisation of digital technology, cultures, AI and algorithms, the book explores social, political and cultural implications of intimacy in a blurry public–private. Chapters are informed by intersectional feminist, queer, anti-racist and postcolonial theories, and show how research can be part of creating affirmative, collective worlds that are more equitable and socially just. Through these lenses, contributors uncover vibrant digitally mediated lives and sociality. They investigate the vibey, emotional and affective sensibilities evolving online – excitement, boredom, mental health, survival – and reveal new activisms formed through digital belonging and a networked identity that responds to and resists marginality.

Consideration is given to the capacity for digital affordances to enable new forms of connection, community and solidarity as well as harm. Authors explore vulnerability and risk through image-based abuse and gendered and sexual violence. They also analyse the forms of digital surveillance, labour and platformed capitalism that shape intimate relations created in kinship and domesticity. By addressing these relationalities as postdigital intimacies, the chapters offer fascinating insights and timely analyses of the intimate relations that emerge from our current cultural and postdigital condition.

Decolonising Andean Identities

Decolonising Andean Identities presents ground-breaking work from scholars carrying out social science research in and from Andean Latin America. It addresses themes of central importance to contemporary perspectives on interdisciplinary gender studies and politics in societies undergoing significant social transformation.

The collection aims to develop the field of decolonial gender studies by showcasing interdisciplinary work at the forefront of scholarship. It draws on international expertise through its diverse contributors, including predominately Latin American scholars. There is an urgent need to broaden the perspectives on gender and gender-based activism in Latin America beyond the Southern Cone and Mexico in order to bring the region as a whole into dialogue with global scholarship.

The contributors use the term ‘Andinxs’ as a provocation to encourage scholars of the region to reconsider approaches the politics of gender, sexuality and (de)coloniality. By responding to the question, ‘Who are Andinxs (Andin-exs)?’ the collection interrogates the postcolonial, gendered and political subjectivities currently undergoing dramatic social change in Andean Latin America.

Urban Claims and the Right to the City

Urban Claims and the Right to the City explores how contested processes of urban development, and the rights of city dwellers, are understood and interpreted from the perspective of women and men working, in different ways, at the grassroots in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and London, UK. In doing so, it represents the grounded voices of authors whose work and lives mean that they engage, on a daily basis, with issues related to housing and spatial rights, and identity struggles around race, gender, disability, sexuality, citizenship and class.

Reivindicações Urbanas e o Direito à Cidade investiga como os processos de desenvolvimento urbano em disputa e os direitos de moradores das cidades são compreendidos e interpretados por mulheres e homens que trabalham, de maneiras diferentes, nas bases populares de Salvador da Bahia, no Brasil, e de Londres, no Reino Unido. Ao fazê-lo, o livro representa vozes situadas de autores cujos trabalhos e vidas estão cotidianamente engajados em questões relacionadas aos direitos à moradia e ao espaço, e em lutas pautadas por identidades de raça, gênero, deficiência, sexualidade, cidadania e classe social.

Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe

Cultural and natural heritage are central to ‘Europe’ and ‘the European project’. They were bound up in the emergence of nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where they were used to justify differences over which border conflicts were fought. Later, the idea of a ‘common European heritage’ provided a rationale for the development of the European Union. Now, the emergence of ‘new’ populist nationalisms shows how the imagined past continues to play a role in cultural and social governance, while a series of interlinked social and ecological crises are changing the ways that heritage operates. New discourses and ontologies are emerging to reconfigure heritage for the circumstances of the present and the uncertainties of the future.

Taking the current role of heritage in Europe as its starting point, Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe presents a number of case studies that explore key themes in this transformation. Contributors draw on a range of disciplinary perspectives to consider, variously, the role of heritage and museums in the migration and climate ‘emergencies’; approaches to urban heritage conservation and practices of curating cities; digital and digitised heritage; the use of heritage as a therapeutic resource; and critical approaches to heritage and its management. Taken together, the chapters explore the multiple ontologies through which cultural and natural heritage have actively intervened in redrawing the futures of Europe and the world.

Critical Dialogues of Urban Governance, Development and Activism

Cities have been sites of some of the most visible manifestations of the evolution of processes of globalization and population expansion, and global cities are at the cutting edge of such changes. Critical Dialogues of Urban Governance, Development and Activism examines changes in governance, property development, urban politics and community activism, in two key global cities: London and Toronto.

The analysis is inherently comparative, but not in the traditional sense – the volume does not seek to deliver a like-for-like comparison. Instead, taking these two cities as empirical cases, the chapters engage in constructive dialogues about the contested and variegated built forms, formal and informal governmental mechanisms and practices, and policy and community-based responses to contemporary urban concerns.

The authors position a critical dialogue on three central issues in contemporary urban studies: governance, real estate and housing, and community activism and engagement. Their less traditional approach to comparative framing seeks to understand London and Toronto from a nuanced perspective, promoting critical reflection on the experiences and evaluative critiques of each urban context, providing insight into each city’s urban trajectory and engaging critically with wider phenomena and influences on the urban governance challenges beyond these two cities.

Community-Led Regeneration

***Shortlisted by 2021 National Urban Design Awards***

Through seven London case studies of communities opposing social housing demolition and/or proposing community-led plans, Community-Led Regeneration offers a toolkit of planning mechanisms and other strategies that residents and planners working with communities can use to resist demolition and propose community-led schemes. The case studies are Walterton and Elgins Community Homes, West Ken and Gibbs Green Community Homes, Cressingham Gardens Community, Greater Carpenters Neighbourhood Forum, Focus E15, People’s Empowerment Alliance for Custom House (PEACH), and Alexandra and Ainsworth Estates. Together, these case studies represent a broad overview of groups that formed as a reaction to proposed demolitions of residents’ housing, and groups that formed as a way to manage residents’ homes and public space better.

Drawing from the case studies, the toolkit includes the use of formal planning instruments, as well as other strategies such as sustained campaigning and activism, forms of citizen-led design, and alternative proposals for the management and ownership of housing by communities themselves.

Community-Led Regeneration targets a diverse audience: from planning professionals and scholars working with communities, to housing activists and residents resisting the demolition of their neighbourhoods and proposing their own plans.

Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Suburban Britain

A study of the conditions of being a citizen, belonging and democracy in suburban Britain, this book focuses on understanding how a community takes on the social responsibility and pressures of being a good citizen through what they call ‘stupid’ events, festivals and parades. Building a community is perceived to be an important and necessary act to enable resilience against the perceived threats of neoliberal socio-economic life such as isolation, selfishness and loss of community. Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Suburban Britain{::}** explores how authoritative knowledge is developed, maintained and deployed by this group as they encounter other ‘social projects’, such as the local council planning committee or academic projects researching participation in urban planning.The activists, who call themselves the ‘Seething Villagers’, model their community activity on the mythical ancient village of Seething where moral tales of how to work together, love others and be a community are laid out in the Seething Tales. These tales include Seething ‘facts’ such as the fact that the ancient Mountain of Seething was destroyed by a giant. The assertion of fact is central to the mechanisms of play and the refusal of expertise at the heart of the Seething community. The book also stands as a reflexive critique on anthropological practice, as the author examines their role in mobilising knowledge and speaking on behalf of others

Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Suburban Britain is of interest to anthropologists, urban studies scholars, geographers and those interested in the notions of democracy, inclusion, citizenship and anthropological practice.