On Wednesday 3rd May 2017, the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity will be hosting a public roundtable entitled ‘From Protest to Resistance: Fighting Back in Hard Times’. This builds on our successful workshop last year – ‘Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity’ – bringing together speakers and contributors to our forthcoming volume, From Protest to Resistance: Fighting Back in Hard Times, with Rowman and Littlefield International.
There is a seemingly unstoppable consolidation of austerity, intensification of surveillance and exploitation at work, and creeping authoritarianism in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. In this roundtable, we observe new, radical forms of mobilisation directly confronting these new trends. It will bring together research from across a range of sites and spaces, including workplace occupations in Argentina and Spain, grassroots mobilisation in the UK and Ireland, migrant workers in trade unions in France and Italy, and new spaces of digital and virtual work. The aim is to draw out possible links across this range of sites, to identify the innovations emerging from a range of ostensibly ‘new’ actors and movements, and to ask what can be learned collectively from these diverse practices of protest and resistance.
Focusing on local, micro-level, and often hidden forms of resistance, this roundtable is an attempt to understand and to show how the new actors, sites, and struggles of resistance we have identified are central to constructing not only new ways of organising and of mobilising, but also of surviving and creating new ways of living in the face of what we identify as these ‘hard times’. In exploring new forms of workplace resistance and alternative workplace organisation, the role of migrant workers in resisting their exploitation, the significance of new and innovative forms of digitalised resistance, and alternative forms of grassroots mobilisation, our contributors aim to place the agency of the marginalised and the actions of the oppressed at the forefront of understanding the (re)construction of the world around us.
The roundtable will be held in Hugh Aston 3.95 from 14.00 – 17.00 and speakers include: Lisa McKenzie (LSE), David Bailey (Birmingham), Saori Shibata (Leiden), Nicholas Kiersey (Ohio), Phoebe Moore (Middlesex), Sylvie Contrepois (London Met); Rossana Cillo (Venice), Adam Fishwick (DMU), Heather Connolly (DMU)
All welcome please register in advance with Nisha Solanki (nisha.solanki@dmu.ac.uk).
For more information contact Dr Adam Fishwick (adam.fishwick@dmu.ac.uk) or Dr Heather Connolly (hconnolly@dmu.ac.uk).