Remembering Resistance is a project with Chris Boyko that explores the urban environment’s impact on protest to understand what this reveals about the changing relationship between people, place and political power. It's an interdisciplinary project bringing together Chris' expertise in urban design and my work on protest and political contention.
Remembering Resistance is a truly collaborative project, we want to engage with a wide variety of actors including activists, academics, civil society organisations and the police to understand how the urban environment is implicated in the process and evolution of protest. Some of the questions we're interested in are:
The project has its own website where you can see more about our ideas and how we're developing them. It began with a pilot project looking at 50 years of protest in Manchester since 1968, the 'Year of the Barricades' which culminated at an event at the People's History Museum in Manchester.
A Heritage Lottery Fund grant has enabled us to explore women's involvement in protest through a project called Remembering Resistance: A Century of Women's Protest in the North of England. Working with citizen researchers, the project will collect oral histories from women involved in protest, map the routes and sites of protest events to identify the ten most contentious sites for women in the North, and engage communities in the history of contention in their area.
Our aim is to explore these ideas in a range of international contexts. We held a workshop in Delhi in July 2018 to develop a network of collaborators to build a project to examine place-protest-power relations in India.
Remembering Resistance is a truly collaborative project, we want to engage with a wide variety of actors including activists, academics, civil society organisations and the police to understand how the urban environment is implicated in the process and evolution of protest. Some of the questions we're interested in are:
- How does space and place affect the origins, course and evolution of protest?
- How have shifts in power been reflected in the urban environment and how has this impacted protest dynamics?
- How do the ways protesters respond to space reflect new imagined spatial or political orders and distributions of power?
- How do movements and their opponents compete over efforts to inscribe meaning on particular places and to what effect?
The project has its own website where you can see more about our ideas and how we're developing them. It began with a pilot project looking at 50 years of protest in Manchester since 1968, the 'Year of the Barricades' which culminated at an event at the People's History Museum in Manchester.
A Heritage Lottery Fund grant has enabled us to explore women's involvement in protest through a project called Remembering Resistance: A Century of Women's Protest in the North of England. Working with citizen researchers, the project will collect oral histories from women involved in protest, map the routes and sites of protest events to identify the ten most contentious sites for women in the North, and engage communities in the history of contention in their area.
Our aim is to explore these ideas in a range of international contexts. We held a workshop in Delhi in July 2018 to develop a network of collaborators to build a project to examine place-protest-power relations in India.
Mapping protest patternsTo reveal the changing history of protest activities and its relationship to the urban environment, the project will map the routes protest take, the sites they stop at, and track changes in these patterns over time.
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Exploring meaning makingTo understand the meaning particular places and spaces have for protesters, we want to talk to those involved in protests to learn how they refer to space; the meaning that place/space has for them and their movements; the systems of power reflected in the urban environment that operate on protest events; and the ways protesters resist those structures.
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Auditing protest dynamicsTo analyse the role the urban environment plays in shaping protest activity, we want to carry out an audit of the urban environment in relation to different protest events. This will make visible the physical characteristics of protest sites, assess what they afford protesters, and interpret the role space may play in shaping protest activity.
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