Women's Protests in the North of England: Research Project

Information from Sparrows' Nest via email

Researchers at Lancaster University are looking for volunteer researchers and participants in oral history interviews for a new project about Women's Protests in the North of England. 

Please see the links and attached documents [copied below] for additional information and contact details.

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"I wanted to introduce a project that is currently being delivered at Lancaster University called Remembering Resistance: A Century of Women’s Protest in the North of England (http://www.rememberingresistance.com).
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The project is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and aims to catalogue and celebrate women’s involvement in protest and campaigning in the North of England."

Invitation:

Remembering Resistance is a new project from researchers at Lancaster University that is bringing to life the history of women’s protest in the North of England.

Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Remembering Resistance will celebrate, catalogue, and engage the public in women’s efforts to bring about political change over the last 100 years by creating a permanent archive of women’s activism to inspire future generations.

To ensure the voices of women who have been involved in protest are preserved, we are gathering oral histories and archival accounts of protest actors, past and present. If you’ve been involved in protest or campaigning and want to share your experiences, we would love to hear from you.

We are going to record this important part of our history by carrying out oral history interviews with women who have been active in protest or political campaigning. Oral history interviews involve recording people’s memories, thoughts and feelings about their experiences. The interview will be conducted by a trained citizen researcher who is working on the project. In the interview you will be asked about your life, focusing particularly on your history of activism and/or your experience of protests.

The outcome of the project will be integrated into the archives of local museums and libraries, as well as helping researchers, local historians, and school pupils understand more about women’s efforts to bring about change.

The aim of the project is to inspire the next generation by recording and celebrating women’s role in protest and activism over the last 100 years. We can’t do this without your stories, so do please get involved!

To learn more about the project, including how to an interviewee, please get in touch with the Project Officer, Claire Selby at c.selby@lancaster.ac.uk. You can learn more at the website: www.rememberingresistance.com, and follow the project on Twitter @rememberresist.

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Advertisement for Citizen Researcher:

Remembering Resistance:

A Century of Women's Protest in the North of England

In 1918, after decades of protest, all men and some women got the vote. To mark the centenary of this milestone in women’s rights, this Heritage Lottery Fund supported project will catalogue, celebrate, and engage the public in women's efforts to ​bring about political change and we want you to get involved!

We're bringing together a team of volunteer citizen researchers who will work with us on the project over the coming months. So if you're interested in women's activism, the history of protest in the North of England, or would like to develop skills in oral history or heritage projects, this is the opportunity for you.

Through the project, we will be gathering oral histories and archival accounts of protest actors, past and present; mapping the last century of protest; and exhibiting materials and resources at local museums.

To help develop and deliver the project, we would like to recruit a number of volunteer ‘Citizen Researchers’.

For us, a Citizen Researcher is someone who:

• Is enthusiastic;
• Has an interest in issues around women’s involvement in protest, the North of England and/or the last 100 years of political history;
• May have skills in library and database searches;
• Has some time over the next year to work with us on various activities and events;
• Likes to work independently as well as together in a team with other Citizen Researchers;
• Wishes to inspire others to get engaged with politics.

Although our Citizen Researchers do not need to be from anywhere specific, our project is taking place in the North of England, so it makes sense that you are from the general area and/or can get to the North of England without much fuss.

To help ensure that every Citizen Researcher knows what they’re doing from the start and to begin developing a network of amazing people, we will be offering training in research skills and oral history interviewing and everything will be paid for. We will also meet regularly to support one another and share what we’ve been working on.

So if you’re interested in becoming a Citizen Researcher or know someone else who would enjoy being part of the Remembering Resistance project, please do get in touch asap to c.selby@lancaster.ac.uk For more information on the project, please go to www.rememberingresistance.com

Spycops in context: new reports from the Centre for Crime and Justice

Update on previous posts, from email:

Forwarded for information...

Spycops in context: new reports from the Centre for Crime and Justice

Over the past year, I have been based at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies on a Research Fellowship sponsored by the Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn trust. As part of that, I have been researching undercover policing. The Centre is today publishing two papers I have written as part of this Fellowship, under the title Spycops in context.

As you may know, from 1968-2008 a dedicated police unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, sent officers into a range of political movements and organisations, from anti-racist to animal rights groups. In the 2000s a second squad, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, expanded the practice nation-wide.

While the practice was exposed in 2010, there has not been much discussion on the longer history of British political policing, and why the state carried out these operations. Why did the state seek to infiltrate a wide range of radical and activist organisations over a prolonged period?

In the Spycops in context papers, I argue that undercover infiltration was just one method used by the secret state to monitor, limit and undermine deep dissent against the status quo. Enforcing and constituting hierarchical social relations, the state’s political policing apparatus functions to preserve a social order based on inequalities of race, gender and class.

One of the papers, Spycops in context: a brief history of political policing in Britain, offers a historical overview of the secret state’s concern with political dissent, from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first.

The other, Spycops in context: counter-subversion, deep dissent and the logic of political policing, analyses the political-economic logic motivating the state’s surveillance and infiltration operations against radical and activist movements.

You can download both papers here:
 https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/publications/spycops-in-context.

Please forward these on to anyone you think might be interested. These papers will primarily be spread through social media and personal contacts.

I hope they will be useful to journalists, campaigners and anyone seeking to understand the history, role and purpose of undercover policing in recent British history.

Research Fellow | Centre for Crime and Justice Studies