London Socialist Historians Seminar Mon 15th March 5.30pm
Asking for the Moon: An investigation of memory and hope in activist movements
Eibhlín Ní Chléirigh
Memory, legacy and heritage are important issues in modern socialist history and research.
Eibhlin will look at the memory of previous struggles influences the activism of the present day.
For example during the 1984 miners strike Dublin raised more money for the strikers than some UK cities and this may well have been influenced by memories of the struggles around the 1913 Dublin lock-out.
Recording of the seminar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/6wyY5TfsCJUnJjTRgrjfszOGPAP5wqjLbRrOFauY_mu3hEHtJU7I_6iQXer5wgKa.Tt60QhkrMJYt97dF Passcode: MbH6P9Q=
More details: Keith Flett 07803 167266
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Asking for the Moon
An investigation of memory and hope in activist movements
History is not just an accumulation of events, but crucially also the human experience of those events’
Joep Leerssen [1986] in ‘Mere Irish and Fíor Gael’
This seminar looks at the diverse ways that communities, activists, and social movements not only strive to document their struggles and experiences, but also how they critically engage with histories, generate education from them, and how such practices inform contemporary struggles for change. These educative aspects of social movements are the context and privileged setting in which communication for development intervention identify, connect with, and resuscitate collective memories, renewing them as tools for transformative activist learning in contemporary settings.
Historical memories provide models of freedom. Knowledge of them generate awareness of historical diversity and change which can inform hopes for alternative and better, freer kinds of societies and social relations. This hope becomes increasingly grounded in the heat and light of contemporary struggles, emancipatory projects and social movement building that aids the institutionalization of alternative spaces, learning, narratives, methods of expression all developed in constant dialogue and communication with the corrective orientations provided by the deep interplay between education and action on the one hand, and on the interconnections across scale and space, time and distance, across and through generations, the past and present, the local and the global forging unities and exponential enhancement of capacities and remit of influence and effectiveness through these networked infrastructures.
Social movements condense and crystalize the autonomy through communal and collective histories are kept, refurbishing them and the mechanism and interventions that develop them as action learning that produces concrete knowledge hope to enhance revolutionizing and effective transformational practice in cause of subaltern and human liberation.
As the hegemonic interests and the global order hastens people and planet towards unchartered waters of unprecedented inequalities, global pandemics and imminent but as yet not inevitable ecological catastrophe, every knowledge and practice of democratic, participatory counter-hegemonic resistance must be nurtured and the hope must be that when the Spring of peoples power of the kind that swept through the Middle East and pulsated across the world a decade ago returns our better educated visions, concrete programmes, activist tools, creative capacities to act to ensure its successful development and realization will be better next time.
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