An opportunity for historians with an interest in questions relating to migration to engage with activists.
Tuesday 21 February 2017, 6pm to 8pm
Dreyfus Room, Birkbeck, 26 Russell Square, London
History Acts workshops are led by activists, who give a short talk or presentation about their work. Historians working on a relevant topic will then respond, before opening it up to group discussion.
Our Panel
Antonia Bright, Movement for Justice
Movement for Justice By Any Means Necessary is an integrated, youth-led civil rights movement, that was set up in 1995 to tackle racism in institutional and established forms. The group confront organised fascism as well as death in custody and wider racism to black people as well as travellers, refugees and asylum seekers.
Lisa Matthews, Coordinator, Right to Remain
Right to Remain is a UK-based human rights organisation, which works with communities, groups and organisations across the UK, providing information, resources, training and assistance to help people to establish their right to remain, and to challenge injustice in the immigration and asylum system.
Dr Becky Taylor is a historian who is centrally concerned with the relationship between the different levels of the state and marginal and minority groups. Her areas of research and writing have taken in histories of Gypsy, Roma and Travellers, ‘immigrants’, those living in poverty, and most recently, refugees. She is currently writing a book for Cambridge University Press called The Britain they Entered: Refugees to Britain in the Twentieth Century. Her understanding of the state is also informed by over two decades of involvement in direct action as part of various grass-roots environmental, peace and social justice movements.
Paul Dudman is the Archivist based at the University of East London. Paul has been responsible for the Refugee Council Archive at UEL since 2002 and has over a decade’s experience working within higher education archives. Paul is a co-convener of the IASFM (International Association for the Study of Forced Migration) Working Group on for the Archiving and Documentation of the History of Forced Migration and Refugees; and Lead Convener for the Oral History Society (UK) Migration Special Interest Group.
History Acts is a new radical history forum, affiliated to the Raphael Samuel Centre, and based at the University of London. Our goal is to bring together radical and left-wing historians and contemporary activists. We want to find new ways to engage as academics with contemporary struggles, to learn from activists, and to see how we can use what expertise and institutional resources we have to provide active solidarity.
History Acts sessions take place on the third Tuesday of every term-time month. They are held at Birkbeck, University of London.
Sessions are free and open to any historian, any history student, or anyone interested in how history can work for social and political change.