Making Social Movements

CFP: Marxist Historians conference

Second Call for Papers

Making Social Movements: The British Marxist Historians and the study of Social Movements

June 26-28, 2002
Edge Hill College of Higher Education, England

Conference Sponsors: The Social Movements Research Group, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, The London Socialist Historians Group, The Socialist History Society, Historical Materialism

Confirmed Plenary Speakers:

  • Dorothy Thompson
  • Brian Manning
  • Bryan D Palmer
  • Ellen Wood

Confirmed Speakers

  • Trevor Bark: Crime Becomes Custom - Custom Becomes Crime
  • David Camfield, York University, Toronto: "Thompsonian" Theory, the Working Class and Modern Social Movements
  • Laurence Cox, Department of Sociology, National University of Ireland: Maynooth Thinking "the social movement"
  • Neil Davidson: Regional Peasant Revolt and Religious Radicalism during the Scottish Bourgeois Revolution
  • James Green, Professor of History and Labor Studies, University of Massachusetts: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements
  • Lesley Hardy: History, Politics and Tradition
  • James Holstun, SUNY, Buffalo: Brian Manning and the Dialectics of Revolt
  • Philip Hunter: Class, Agency and Struggle in British Marxist Historiography: Some Lessons for the study of Social Movements
  • Alan Johnson, Edge Hill College, England: Leadership and Class Formation: Christopher Hill and the English Revolution
  • Geoff Kennedy, York University, Toronto: Digger Radicalism and Agrarian Capitalism
  • Wade Matthews, University of Strathclyde: The Poverty of Strategy: Socialism and the British Marxists
  • Professor John Mcilroy and Professor Alan Campbell, University of Manchester: The Communist Party Historians Group and Problems in Communist Party historiography
  • Viv Mackay, University of Southampton: Labour Disputes as Contentious Politics: Refiguring the 1928 Garment Workers Strike at the London "Rego" Factory
  • Antonio Negro, State University of Campinas, Brazil: A Limited Number of Ideas for an Unlimited Social History. Notes on Brazilian Trends
  • Alf Nilsen, University of Bergen, Norway: Marxist and Postmodern Perspectives on Social Movements
  • Mi Park, London School of Economics: Ideology and Lived Experience: A case study of Revolutionary Movements in South Korea,1980-1995
  • Dave Renton, TUC Education: English Experiences: The problem of Nationalism in the Work of the British Marxist Historians
  • Anneke Ribberink, History Dept, Free University, Amsterdam: Leading Ladies and Cause Minders: The Silent Generation and the Second Feminist Movements
  • Jess Rigelhaupt, University of Michigan: "The Paradox of a Jim Crow Navy": The Post Chicago Mutiny, The Communist Party, and the California Civil Rights Movement
  • Richard Romain and Edur Valasco, Associate Professor, University of Toronto and Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana: Continental Integration, Neoliberalism and the Mexican Working Class
  • Sean Scalmer, Macquarie University, Australia: The Problem of Decline:Demobilisation and Fracturing of Working Class Politics
  • Hira Singh, Department of Sociology, York University: Anti-Fuedal, Anti-Colonial Protests in India: Structure, Tradition,Ideology
  • Roger Spalding, Edge Hill College of Higher Education: EP Thompson and the Popular Front
  • Stephen Woodhams, Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck College: New wine in old bottles:the transformation of a generation

Conference Themes

How might the extraordinary body of historical writing produced by the "British Marxist historians" - Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, DonaTorr, John Saville, Dorothy Thompson, George Rudé and others - enable scholars and activists to better understand the making of social movements? This is a timely moment to examine their legacy. Many social movement scholars are pushing beyond the static "models" drawn from rational- choice theory and the crude and reductive "newmovement"/"old movement" dichotomies developed by European social theory. What can social movement scholars and activists learn from a critical engagement with the historiography of movement and protest in the writings of the British Marxist historians? And from the theoretical and conceptual innovations developed through their history writing? What might be learnt from the sensibility and style of the British Marxist historians, from their "committed" social and political relation to their subject, to their writing of history "from the bottom up"? And what can social movement studies - now in an exciting period of sustained growth, connected to the rebirth of popular protest, and a locus for fruitful academic-activist dialogue - bring to this exchange?

We invite proposals for papers, which explore any aspect of the legacy of the British Marxist historians for the study of popular protest and social movements. Themes include:

  • Theorising social movements
  • Class, gender, "race" and social movement
  • The cultural and moral mediation of protest and movement
  • Agency and the individual-in-the-movement
  • Ideology, discourse and the study of social movements
  • ˜The People" and protest
  • Protest as ethic
  • The leadership of social movements
  • Revolutions and social movements
  • The "primitive rebel"
  • Using sources to study social movements
  • Literature and the study of protest
  • Marxism and the British Marxist Historians

Offers of Papers

FINAL DEADLINE FOR 400 WORD PROPOSALS: MARCH 1 2002

Email offers of papers to the conference organiser johnsona@edgehill.ac.uk or write to Alan Johnson, Social Movements Research Group, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, St Helens Road, Ormskirk, Lancashire, L394QP.

Offers of papers should not be more than 400 words long and should be submitted by 1 March 2002. Full papers, maximum length 8,000 words, must be submitted by 6 May 2002 to enable their advance distribution to conference participants. The conference organiser will actively pursue publication of a selection of conference papers.

Conference Arrangements
Edge Hill College of Higher Education is situated just outside the market town of Ormskirk, 30 miles from Liverpool and Manchester, and twenty minutes from the seaside resort of Southport. From Manchester Airport, a train can be taken to Ormskirk Station, changing at Preston Station.

The cost of the full conference package will be £130 (en suite room) or £100 (standard room), which will include accommodation, conference fees, conference papers, refreshments, lunches, evening meals. Further details of costs and booking forms can be obtained by sending an email to johnsona@edgehill.ac.uk.

On behalf of the Conference Organising Committee
Matthew Beaumont, Pembroke College, Oxford University and Historical Materialism Journal
Keith Flett, London Socialist Historians Group
Alan Johnson, Edge Hill College of Higher Education Social Movements Research Group and Historical Materialism Journal (conference organiser)
Stephen Woodhams, Socialist History Society