Category: Past

ACTIVISM & MUTUAL AID IN THE PANDEMIC

ONLINE MEETING
THURSDAY 11 FEBRUARY 6:30PM-8:30PM (GMT)

ACTIVISTS

Carla Ecola, Director, The Outside Project, the UK’s first LGBTIQ+ Crisis/Homeless Shelter & Community Centre. We are LGBTIQ+ colleagues, friends & activists who work in the Homeless sector & have lived experience of homelessness & the unique, complex issues our community face. 

Nadia, Bent Bars Project. The Bent Bars Project is a letter-writing project for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, gender-variant, intersex, and queer prisoners in Britain. The project was founded in 2009, responding to a clear need to develop stronger connections and build solidarity between LGBTQ communities inside and outside prison walls. The project is run by a small volunteer collective who meet weekly (currently online), of which Nadia has been a member of since 2015.

HISTORIANS 

Ralph Day is a doctoral researcher at Birkbeck. His current research focuses on the telephone information and support service London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard. 

Queer Pandemic: Resilience in Times of Crisis is a video-based oral history project to collect stories about the experiences of LGBTQ+ people in the UK in the era of COVID-19. Queer Pandemic is an international collaboration between: Queer Britain; Goldsmiths, University of London; and Kent State University. Molly Merryman, research director for Queer Britain and the director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at Kent State University, will be representing the project on the panel.

THURSDAY 28 JANUARY – 6:30pm-8:30pm

Online Meeting

ACTIVISTS

Benjamin Morgan, Public Interest Law Centre. PILC exists to challenge injustice through legal representation, strategic litigation, research and legal education. In 2017, PILC worked with North East London Migrant Action (Nelma) to bring a successful case against data sharing between homelessness charities and Immigration enforcement towards the removal of migrant rough sleepers. PILC is currently preparing a legal challenge to the new Immigration Rule that makes rough sleeping itself grounds for removal. 

The No Evictions Network started in Summer 2018 to organise neighbourhoods in Glasgow against the mass eviction of asylum seekers from SERCO-run accommodation across the city. The campaign culminated in Serco losing their contract in Scotland, but being replaced by a new company: Mears. Throughout the lockdown this year the Network supported people evicted from asylum accommodation and rehoused, or detained, in hotels – whilst also campaigning against the horrendous conditions people faced.

The OUR HOMES Renters Research Project is a Participatory Action Research Project started by the Hackney Branch of the London Renters Union. In summer 2019, a group of renters were employed by the union to research their own and their wider community’s housing situations. Together they collectively made a film “Hostile Housing” which asks what the problems are, who is responsible and what we need to do to make change.

HISTORIANS 

Amy Grant is a PhD candidate at University of East Anglia. Amy researches the state, racism, hate and the church in late 20th century Britain, through the lens of squatting, sanctuary campaigns and anti-deportation resistance between the 1970s and 1990s.

Dr Becky Taylor is a historian who is centrally concerned with the relationship between the different levels of the state and marginal and minority groups. Her areas of research and writing have taken in histories of Gypsy, Roma and Travellers, ‘immigrants’, those living in poverty, and most recently, refugees. She is currently writing a book for Cambridge University Press called The Britain they Entered: Refugees to Britain in the Twentieth Century. Her understanding of the state is also informed by over two decades of involvement in direct action as part of various grass-roots environmental, peace and social justice movements.

1 December, 6:30pm – 8:30pm

ONLINE MEETING

Watch the recording

ACTIVISTS

Caz Hattam co-founded The Unity Project (TUP) in 2017 and has coordinated the project since. The Unity Project wants an end to the policy of ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) and the discrimination and inequality behind it. TUP supports people to remove the NRPF condition from their leave to remain through making ‘Change of Conditions’ applications. 

Karim Ali & Hester Watson of Funnel, a hyperlocal organisation based in Southwark. They are committed to fighting food insecurity, with core aims to educate, advocate and act. Funnel’s collection points collect food donations and pass them on to a larger local foodbank. The other branch of Funnel, called Funnel Schools, is currently in the works.

HISTORIANS  

Pat Thane is Visiting Professor in History at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research examines inequalities and social policy in Britain from the twentieth century, with a special interest in poverty, gender, and age.

Kate Bradley is Reader in Social History/Policy at the University of Kent. Her research explores British social history from 1918 with a focus on the relationship between individuals and the state. Other research interests include philanthropy and social justice. She has also worked in the voluntary and public sectors.

Tuesday 17 November 6:30-8:30pm

Watch the recording & download the write-up

ACTIVISTS

Becka Hudson researches and campaigns on criminal justice issues in the UK. She was involved with the Fck Boris campaign in 2019, and Grime4Corbyn in both 2017& 2019.

Sophie Wilson is a Labour councillor and chair of Acorn Sheffield. She was the Labour Party candidate for Rother Valley in 2019.

Chris Peace is an activist with the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign. She was the Labour Party candidate for North East Derbyshire in 2019.

HISTORIANS

John Callaghan is Professor of Politics & Contemporary History at the University of Salford. His research interests include: the politics and history of socialism, international history since 1789 and political ideologies. Amongst other works he is the author of The Far Left in British Politics (1987) Socialism in Britain Since 1884 (1990), and The Labour Party and Foreign Policy: A History (2007).

Barnaby Raine is an intellectual historian with degrees from Oxford and Columbia, where he is now writing his PhD. He studies the decline of thinking about the end of capitalism from Marx to twentieth century debates in Britain, against backdrops of declining empire and the increasing prominence of the nation-state.

How historians can support campaigners and challenge institutional racism

TUESDAY 16 JUNE 6:30PM-8:30PM

Watch the recording & download the write-up

ACTIVISTS

Jabu-Nala Hartley, Black Lives Matter / Oxford Anti-Racist City
Jabu co-founded Oxford Anti-Racist City, a project which focuses on disrupting and challenging institutional racism. Jabu has been part of the Black Lives Matters protests in Oxford, where thousands gathered in response to the civil unrest in America but also focus on the experience of racist and brutal policing in the UK.

Florence Adeoye, Young Historians Project
Florence Adeoye is a recent International Politcs, Policy and History graduate from the University of Liverpool. She is a member of the Young Historians Project, a group of young people that excavate African and Caribbean people’s history in the UK.

HISTORIANS  

Dr Christienna Fryar is a lecturer in Black British History at Goldsmiths, University of London and a historian of modern Britain, the British Empire, and the Modern Caribbean, focusing on Britain’s centuries-long imperial and especially postemancipation entanglements with the Caribbean. Her work embeds modern British history within the fields of comparative slavery and emancipation studies. 

Dr Ashley Howard is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa.Her research interests include African Americans in the Midwest; the intersection between race, class, and gender; and the global history of racial violence. Her manuscript Prairie Fires: Class, Gender, and Regional Intersections in the 1960s Urban Rebellions analyzes the 1960s urban rebellions in the Midwest, grounded in the way race, class, gender, and region played critical and overlapping roles in defining resistance to racialized oppression.

Those most affected by COVID-19 are often unable to speak. Who else is not being heard or listened to? Historians and archivists consider what needs to be done.

ONLINE MEETING
TUESDAY 9 JUNE 6:30PM-8:30PM

Watch the recording and download the write-up.

ACTIVISTS

Paul Dudman – Living Refugee Archive
The Living Refugee Archive is based at the University of East London’s Library at Docklands, the home of the Refugee Council Archive for over a decade. It facilitates accessibility to archival resources on the refugee and forced migration experience.

Jen Hoyer & Nora Almeida – Interference Archive
The Interference Archive was founded in Brooklyn in 2011 and explores the relationship between cultural production and social movements. Its archival collection comprises cultural ephemera produced by and for social movements worldwide. It also produces publications and hosts a study centre and public programmes.

Fani Arampatzidou & Chris Jones – MayDay Rooms
The MayDay Rooms collect and preserve historical materials related to social movements, experimental culture and the radical expression of marginalised figures and groups. Their current project Pandemic Notes works to build an archive around the Covid-19 crisis.

HISTORIANS

Dr Charlotte Clements is Senior Lecturer in History at London South Bank University. She specialises in youth, welfare and charity in Britain since 1945 and has worked on a British Academy project supporting charities and voluntary archives to preserve and use their archives.

Dr Andrew Flinn is Reader in Archival Studies and Oral History at University College London. His academic interests include documenting the activities of political movements and parties, particularly grassroots political activity and the use of history by political parties and activists.

How the pandemic has exacerbated existing appalling conditions in prisons and migrant detention centres, and how abolitionist and anti-prison expansion activists are adapting to socially distant forms of organising.

ONLINE MEETING
Tuesday 19 May 6:30PM – 8:30PM

Download the event’s write-up & watch the recording.

ACTIVISTS

Cambridgeshire Prisoner Detainee Solidarity is an abolitionist activist group standing in solidarity with those incarcerated in Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre and the four Cambridgeshire prisons by campaigning for their safety and protection.

The Prisoner Solidarity Network is a group of people committed to dismantling the criminal justice system and building a society based on collective care. Our members include people inside and outside of prisons. Some of us are ex-prisoners and some are children, partners or friends of people inside.

HISTORIANS

Dr Ben Bethell, University of the Arts, London
Ben is an historian of penal theory, policy and practice. His publications include ‘An exception too far: “gentleman” convicts and the 1878-9 Penal Servitude Acts Commission’, and ‘Defining “unnatural crime”: sex and the English convict system, 1850-1900’.

Dr Katherine Roscoe, University of Liverpool
Katherine is a historical criminologist researching global mobilities, unfree labour and racial inequalities, with a particular focus on mid-nineteenth century crime and punishment in Britain and its former empire. Her current project focuses on the history of the Cockatoo Island convicts.

How activists can use, resist or generate the data that is being deployed in this crisis

ONLINE MEETING
Tuesday 5 May 6:30PM – 8:30PM

ACTIVISTS

Radical Statistics Group was formed in 1975 by researchers and statisticians with a common interest about the political implications of their work. Members are committed to helping build a more free, democratic and egalitarian society.

Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data-visualization, data analysis, and storytelling collective documenting the dispossession and resistance upon gentrifying landscapes. The collective primarily works in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City.

HISTORIANS

Professor Oz Frankel is Associate Professor of History at the New School for Social Research, New York. His book States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain and the United States explores the early roots of the modern informational states. 

Professor Edward Higgs is Professor of History at the University of Essex, UK. He has written widely on the history of censuses and surveys, civil registration, women’s work, the impact of the digital revolution on archives, the information state, and the history of identification.

Dr Guy Beckett is a historian of ideas. His research looks at the impact of nineeenth-century social statistics on governance and political debates. He recently completed his PhD and is a founder of History Acts.

ALSO CONTRIBUTING

Professor Zohreh Bayatrizi, University of Alberta, works on the history of sociology, knowledge and power, law and society, sociology of death and dying, sociological research & social policy.

Professor Tim Rowse, Western Sydney University, works on Australia’s colonial history, including the history of its official statistics, which he sees as a form of colonial knowledge.

How can workers organise, resist & protect themselves during this pandemic

ONLINE MEETING
Tuesday 28 April 6:30pm – 8:30pm

CATCH UP

If you missed this session you can listen to the audio and read the write-up.

Download the write-up.

ACTIVISTS

SWARM – Sex Worker Advocacy & Resistance Movement is a collective founded and led by sex workers who believe in self-determination, solidarity and co-operation. They campaign for the rights and safety of everyone who sells sexual services. Together they organise skill-shares and support meet-ups just for sex workers, as well as public events. They are UK-based and part of the global sex worker-led movement advocating the full decriminalisation of sex work.

• donate to SWARM

Ian Hodson, National President, Bakers, Food & Allied Workers Union (BFAWU). The BFAWU has recently been organising the McDonalds strikes. During the crisis the union is campaigning for employers to top-up the wages of furloughed fast-food and hospitality workers to 100%. 

Henry Lopez, President, Independent Workers Union of Great Britain Union (IWGB). The IWGB is a small, independent trade union, whose members are predominantly low paid migrant workers in London. The union was founded in 2012. The IWGB is a campaigning union, which has waged a number of high profile campaigns such as the 3 Cosas Campaign (sick pay, holidays, and pensions) at the University of London.

• precarious workers petition
• Tweets from @IWGBunion
• sick pay for Foster Carers

HISTORIANS  

Dr Erin Maglaque is an early modern historian at the University of Sheffield. She is currently at work on a new project on care work and the family in early modern Italy.

Dr Jack Saunders is a labour historian. His work looks at the history of work in the NHS and in the motor industry. He currently teaches twentieth-century British history at Kings College London.

Organising community support and mutual aid during pandemics

Online Meeting
Part 1 Thursday 2 April: 6:30pm-7:15pm
Part 2 Tuesday 7 April: 6:30pm – 8:00pm

CATCH UP

If you missed this session you can listen to the audio, and download the write-up.

Download write up

ACTIVISTS

Seth Wheeler – Labour Transformed is a network for anti-capitalist Labour Party members organising for socialism. Recently, they set up the Virtual Social Centre, to bring together the different campaigns and initiatives emerging in response to the triple threat of Covid19, the financial crisis and authoritarian governance into one place.

Aviah Day founded the Hackney Covid-19 Mutual Aid group. She is an activist with Sisters Uncut, and a lecturer in Criminology at Birkbeck, University of London.

HISTORIANS

Dave Hitchcock is Senior Lecturer in History at Canterbury Christ Church University. He is interested in early modern social and cultural history, particularly of England, in poverty, mobility, and inequalities, and has taught on the Great Plague of London of 1665-1666.

Michael Bresalier is a lecturer in the History of Medicine, with expertise in the social, cultural, economic, and global dimensions of health and disease in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has researched and published on nineteenth and twentieth century British medical science and its institutions, specifically the role of bacteriology and virology in the modern state, military and empire. 

This is our first online History Acts workshop.