Category: Past

An opportunity for historians with an interest in left wing governments to engage with Momentum and Labour activists.

Tuesday 16 January 2018 18:00 to 20:00
ROOM CHANGE 6pm to 8pm Dreyfus Room, Birkbeck
26 Russell Square, London

History Acts workshops are led by activists, who give a short talk or presentation about their work. Historians working on a relevant topic will then respond, before opening it up to group discussion.

Our Panel

Beth Foster-Ogg is a Labour activist and Momentum Training Organiser. She has had articles published by Labour List and the Independent, and in 2016 she ran for the position of Chair of London Young Labour.

Michael Walker is a contributor to Novara Media and a Labour activist. In 2016, he worked on the Jeremy for Labour leadership campaign in the volunteer mobilisation team and was a panellist at our first History Acts workshop.

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).

Charlotte Riley is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century British History at the University of Southampton. She specialises in the history of twentieth-century Britain, especially the Labour Party, aid and development, and decolonization. She is also interested more broadly in the culture of British politics and society, especially issues around gender politics and the British state.  She is currently working on a monograph exploring the Labour Party’s aid and development policies from the 1920s to the 1970s.

An opportunity for historians to engage with activists.

Thursday 6 July 2017 11am to 12.30pm
Modern British Studies Conference 2017
UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM, Room N225, Gisbert Kapp Building

History Acts workshops are led by activists, who give a short talk or presentation about their work. Historians working on a relevant topic will then respond, before opening it up to group discussion.

Our Panel

Malachi Thomas is one of the organisers of Black Lives Matter protests in Nottingham. In November 2016 he was convicted of unlawfully obstructing a highway having used foam-filled “lock-on devices” to link himself to other activists before lying across tram lines outside Nottingham’s Theatre Royal during a “national day of action” in August.

Tippa Naphtali is the founder of 4WardEver UK and the cousin of custody death victim, Mikey Powell, from Birmingham. Established June 2006, 4WardEver provides a one-stop-resource for case profiles, news and event details, useful resources, statistics, appeals, and more in relation to deaths and abuses whilst in custody; including the death penalty, other injustices and human rights abuses in the UK and internationally.

Dr Christienna Fryar is starting as a lecturer of the history of slavery and unfree labour at the University of Liverpool this July. Previously, she spent four years as an assistant professor of history at SUNY Buffalo State. She is completing her first book, The Measure of Empire: Disaster and British Imperialism in Postemancipation Jamaica, which explores how imperial disaster politics belied contemporary popular narratives of Jamaica’s ruin in the eight decades after emancipation. Her work focuses on the history of emancipation as the history of Britain, the British Empire, and the British Commonwealth since 1800.

Dr Kennetta Perry specializes in Atlantic World history with a particular emphasis on transnational race politics, empire, migration and movements for citizenship among people of African descent in Europe, the Caribbean and the United States. Her book, London Is The Place For Me:Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2015). Her book examines how a largely Afro-Caribbean population of Black Britons advocated for citizenship rights and transformed the political landscape in Britain in the decades following World War II.

Presentations:

•  Tippa Naphtali – History Acts 07 – From Protest to Change

An opportunity for historians with an interest in the state of progressive media to  engage with activists.

Tuesday 16  May 2017 6pm to 8pm
Dreyfus Room, Birkbeck, 26 Russell Square, London

“The public is desperately in need of a new-media revolution. One that promotes freedom, equality and fairness; a media that allows its writers to truly express their informed opinions without censorship or an editorial narrative to maintain.” Evolvepolitics.com

History Acts workshops are led by activists, who give a short talk or presentation about their work. Historians working on a relevant topic will then respond, before opening it up to group discussion.

Our Panel

SKWAWKBOX is written to try to present information and analysis that will rarely make it into the mainstream media because it doesn’t fit their agenda and the narrative they want to present. People with evidence contact the SKWAWKBOX because they know their identities will be protected and their stories presented fairly.

Evolvepolitics.com Evolve Politics is a truly independent, shared equity media outlet, providing incisive news reporting and investigative journalism that highlights and exposes injustice, inequality and unfairness within UK politics, and throughout society in general.

Women Against Rape was founded in 1976. It has won changes in the law, such as making rape in marriage a crime, set legal precedents and achieved compensation for many women.

Dr Laura Beers is a lecturer in Modern British History at Birmingham University. Her primary research interest is political history, particularly the intersection between politics and the mass media, the relationship between politics and gender, and international politics between the two World Wars.

An opportunity for historians with an interest in the housing crisis to  engage with activists.

Tuesday 21 March 2017 6pm to 8pm
Dreyfus Room, Birkbeck, 26 Russell Square, London

History Acts workshops are led by activists, who give a short talk or presentation about their work. Historians working on a relevant topic will then respond, before opening it up to group discussion.

Our Panel

Hackney Digs campaign for a better deal for people renting in Hackney and beyond. They are a private renter information, support and campaign group, run by Hackney renters, for Hackney renters. Digs support anyone who is renting privately in Hackney or who is homeless or insecurely housed and trying to find a home in Hackney’s private rented sector.

Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians recently squatted a £15m Belgravia mansion owned by Russian billionaire Andrey Goncharenko. They used it as a homeless shelter and community centre, open to any group that ‘would disgust the wealthy’. The group Anal, who briefly opened a squat in Admiralty Arch in 2015, have squatted a number of prominent buildings since their formation in 2014.

The Focus E15 campaign was born in September 2013 when a group of young mothers were served eviction notices by East Thames Housing Association after Newham Council cut its funding to the Focus E15 hostel for young homeless people. They demand social housing, not social cleansing!

Professor Jerry White Formerly a public health inspector enforcing housing standards in Islington in the 1970s, and then Chief Executive of the London Borough of Hackney from 1989 to 1995, Jerry White has been researching and writing London history since the mid-1970s. Among his many published works is London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People. His most recent book, Mansions of Misery. A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, was published in October 2016. He is Professor of Modern London History at Birkbeck, University of London.

Dr Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite is a historian currently working on squatting in postwar London, and on women’s activism during the miners’ strike of 1984-5. She has published work on Thatcher, New Labour, and the 1970s in the Historical Journal, Twentieth Century British History and elsewhere.

An opportunity for historians with an interest in questions relating to migration to engage with activists.

Tuesday 21 February 2017, 6pm to 8pm
Dreyfus Room, Birkbeck, 26 Russell Square, London

History Acts workshops are led by activists, who give a short talk or presentation about their work. Historians working on a relevant topic will then respond, before opening it up to group discussion.

Our Panel

Antonia Bright, Movement for Justice
Movement for Justice By Any Means Necessary is an integrated, youth-led civil rights movement, that was set up in 1995 to tackle racism in institutional and established forms. The group confront organised fascism as well as death in custody and wider racism to black people as well as travellers, refugees and asylum seekers.

Lisa Matthews, Coordinator, Right to Remain
Right to Remain is a UK-based human rights organisation, which works with communities, groups and organisations across the UK, providing information, resources, training and assistance to help people to establish their right to remain, and to challenge injustice in the immigration and asylum system.

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.

Paul Dudman is the Archivist based at the University of East London. Paul has been responsible for the Refugee Council Archive at UEL since 2002 and has over a decade’s experience working within higher education archives. Paul is a co-convener of the IASFM (International Association for the Study of Forced Migration) Working Group on for the Archiving and Documentation of the History of Forced Migration and Refugees; and Lead Convener for the Oral History Society (UK) Migration Special Interest Group.

History Acts is a new radical history forum, affiliated to the Raphael Samuel Centre, and based at the University of London. Our goal is to bring together radical and left-wing historians and contemporary activists. We want to find new ways to engage as academics with contemporary struggles, to learn from activists, and to see how we can use what expertise and institutional resources we have to provide active solidarity.

History Acts sessions take place on the third Tuesday of every term-time month. They are held at Birkbeck, University of London.
Sessions are free and open to any historian, any history student, or anyone interested in how history can work for social and political change.

An opportunity for historians with an interest in questions relating to organised labour to engage with union activists. The session will have a particular focus on the formation of new unions.

Tuesday17 January 2017 6pm to 8pm
Dreyfus Room, Birkbeck, 26 Russell Square, London

History Acts workshops are led by activists, who give a short talk or presentation about their work. Historians working on a relevant topic will then respond, before opening it up to group discussion.

Our Panel

Petros Elia, General Secretary, United Voices of the World Union
United Voices of the World Union is a grassroots, member-led, trade union that supports some of the most oppressed and unrepresented groups of predominantly migrant workers in the UK and takes on some of the most unscrupulous employers.

Henry Chango Lopez, President of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain
Independent Workers Union of Great Britain 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 for the London Living Wage at the Royal Opera House and at John Lewis, and the 3 Cosas Campaign (sick pay, holidays, and pensions) at the University of London.

Professor Ralph Darlington Professor of Employment Relations, University of Salford. His main research is concerned with the dynamics of trade union organisation, activity and consciousness in Britain and internationally within both contemporary and historical settings. Ralph has authored, co-authored and edited six books, including The Dynamics of Workplace Unionism (1994), The Political Trajectory of J.T. Murphy (1998), Glorious Summer (2001), Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism: An International Comparative Analysis (2008), What’s the Point of Industrial Relations?: In Defence of Critical Social Science (2009), and Radical Unionism (2013).

Dr Laura Schwartz Associate Professor in Modern British History, Warwick University. Her main research interests are the history of feminism and radical movements in Britain, and she is completing her third monograph on ‘Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class Conflict and Domestic Labour in the British Women’s Suffrage Movement’.

History Acts is a new radical history forum, affiliated to the Raphael Samuel Centre, and based at the University of London. Our goal is to bring together radical and left-wing historians and contemporary activists. We want to find new ways to engage as academics with contemporary struggles, to learn from activists, and to see how we can use what expertise and institutional resources we have to provide active solidarity.

History Acts sessions take place on the third Tuesday of every term-time month. They are held at Birkbeck, University of London.
Sessions are free and open to any historian, any history student, or anyone interested in how history can work for social and political change.