Call For Papers
'Protests Past and Present: Resistance and Persistence Towards Equality' Conference, Liverpool John Moores University, 24th May 2019.
This one-day conference seeks to explore understandings of protest movements that have sought to dismantle hegemonic cultural discourses and conservative cultures. It aims to interrogate the category of the culturally marginalised to broaden discussions about the present conservative era.
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Such discussions are timely as this current era marks the beginning of various anniversaries of protest movements; this year welcomes the centenary of the women’s (partial) suffrage; next year will see the fifty year anniversary of the Stonewall riots in 1969 which birthed the LGBT movements; 2017 celebrating 50 years of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain; 50 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King during the civil rights movement in the United States of America; 50 years since the beginning of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland; and just over 40 years since the punk movement sought to disrupt
a conservative Britain in steep economic decline.
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With the past movements in mind, we hope the conference will open up a space to assess the current continued global struggle towards equality. With one million people identifying themselves as LGBT+ in the UK alone, there is a call for more popular culture catered to these identities (Independent, 2017). Although huge strides have been made in recognising LGBT+ rights, celebrated through annual Pride marches and dedicated a whole month to celebrating LGBT+ history held every March, not all countries have had this success. In 2017 news surfaced of the torture and murder of LGBT+ people held in unofficial prisons in Chechyna, a region under Russian control, sparking international protests, from marches to online petitions.
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The #RepealThe8th and In Her Shoes social media campaigns contributed to the historic vote for women’s right to reproductive choice. The landslide vote for the Yes campaign in the Repeal the 8th movement in the Republic of Ireland signalled a positive step towards feminist equality, however, the global feminist movement is still under threat from conservative politics. The continued denial of reproductive justice within Northern Ireland, a region within the UK, is a marker of this. Globally, though, there is also a need for continued protest as August 2018 has seen the rejection of the Argentinian legislation to provide reproductive healthcare.
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Likewise in the United States, the #TakeAKnee protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, both protested police brutality on People of Colour. President Trump’s criticism of the protest as ‘disrespectful’ to America raises pertinent questions surrounding racial equality. Artistic responses to this have been varied and many, not least including the publication of Claudia Rankine’s award winning poetry-memoir Citizen (2015) as well as Netflix’s Orange is the New Black (2018) portrayal of the killing of an African American female inmate at the hands of a white male prison guard.
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In an age of Donald Trump hyper-conservatism, sustained austerity in Brexit-era Britain and the peak of a new Gilded Age, we ask how can we learn from past protest movements to challenge the current status quo? We ask how can culturally marginalised groups challenge the hegemonic narrative? How can we learn from the counter-cultures of the past to inform the present? How can we use social media, like the #MeToo movement, to resist the culturally conservative in the real world?
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The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, from gender, race, queer and post-colonial studies, to assess present and past protest movements in the hope of a shift towards equality.
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Please send abstracts of 250 words to protestspastandpresent@gmail.com by 30th January 2019.
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