Conferences & Upcoming Events


CONFERENCE: Getting the Picture

Using visual collections as historical evidence

A day conference to be held at the People’s History Museum, Manchester

Monday 16 October 2006

Open to all

Speakers will be drawn from networks of specialist museums, libraries and archives and some of their academic partners. These will include the National Banner Initiative, the British Cartoon Forum, the Friendly Societies Research Group and the Co-operative History Group. Papers will show academics how they can use social history object collections as historical evidence, and encourage museums to realise their historic potential, making them accessible to researchers. A case study of the collaboration between the People’s History Museum and the University of Central Lancashire will also be presented.

Speakers will include

Nicholas Hiley, Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature, University of Kent

Mark Dennis, Library and Museum of Freemasonry, London

Gillian Lonergan, National Co-operative Archive, Manchester

Nick Mansfield, People’s History Museum, Manchester

John Walton, Department of Humanities, University of Central Lancashire 

 

CONFERENCE: Labour Party History: 

A conference to mark the centenary of the formation in 1906 of the Parliamentary Labour Party

 

The Society for the Study of Labour History intends to mark, in its 46th anniversary year, the centenary of the formation in 1906 of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The centenary arises at a time when the 6th Labour government will be in its eight year of office. Papers at the conference are likely to be sought under the following main themes: ‘Labour and the Left’, ‘Labour and the Right’, ‘Labour, the Trade Unions and Industry’, ‘Labour and Welfare’, ‘Constitutions and the Labour Party’, ‘Labour in Comparative Context’ and ‘Labour and International Affairs’. The conference will be held at South Bank University on 25 November 2006.

 

More details here

 

CONFERENCE 

Call for Papers: From the Blanketeers to the Present: Understanding Protests of the Unemployed

To be held at the German Historical Institute, London

16/17 February 2007

 

The lack of work has been a recurrent grievance for working people and a site of protest since the early days of labour movements. This one day conference will bring together the latest international research into the protests of the workless.

 

Papers will be considered that address the following topics:

 

i) Explaining the protests of the unemployed.

There is a distinctiveness to the protests of the unemployed that requires explanation. These peculiarities exist at the level of the forms, geographies, time-scales and the organizations of protest. In the existing research, the principal modes of explanation have been: unemployment as a social location, the social psychology of unemployment, attitudinal models, institutional factors and questions of activism and agency.

 

ii) Protests of the unemployed and identity.

The protests of the unemployed have complex relationship to identity. The experience of unemployment and its relief have been highly differentiated according to nationality, ethnicity, region, gender and industry. The current research is divided over whether there is an unemployed condition or whether unemployment is a fragmented multiplicity of unconnected situations. The interplay between identity and protest is therefore a suggestive one at a number of levels. Different responses are possible. Identity could be seen as a constitutive feature of protest, or alternatively, the transcendence of particular identities could be viewed as part of a process of protest. Furthermore, the remembering or forgetting of these protests has a bearing on formation of collective identities.

 

iii) Impacts of protest

The problem of the impact of protest confronts all those who study social conflict. Some protests of the unemployed have been directed to specific, sometimes local, alterations in circumstances such as an improvement in benefit rates or the prevention of an eviction. Beyond such events, where success and failure is easily attributable, the impact of protest is more problematic and contentious.

 

iv) Representations and discourses of the protests of the unemployed.

The protest of the unemployed has been represented in every conceivable media: film, novels, painting, sculpture, photography and plays. Contested contemporaneous and historical meanings and discourses of the protests of the unemployed can be identified and analyzed through these cultural forms.

 

For further information or to send abstracts of papers (up to 1,000 words) until 15 September 2006: Matthias Reiss, German Historical Institute London, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NJ, reiss@ghil.ac.uk or Matt Perry matt.perry@sunderland.ac.uk ADMC, University of Sunderland, Priestman building, Green Terrace, Sunderland SR1 3PZ

GREENWICH MARITIME INSTITUTE

CALL FOR PAPERS for A CONFERENCE On

‘GENDER, EMOTION, WORK AND TRAVEL: WOMEN TRANSPORT WORKERS AND PASSENGERS PAST AND PRESENT’

Friday and Saturday 22 and 23 June 2007
At Greenwich Maritime Institute (GMI) University of Greenwich, London

Papers are welcome on any aspect of the conference theme. Proposals, no more than 250 words in length, should be submitted by 11 December 2006. Postgraduate attendance and participation is particularly welcome.

More details here.

 

 


News HomeOfficers  |  Contacts  |  LHR  |  Archives  | AwardsConferences  |  Links