Making Social Movements: The British Marxist Historians and the study of Social Movements
June 26-28, 2002, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, England

Conference Sponsors
The Social Movements Research Group, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, The London Socialist Historians Group, The Socialist History Society, Historical Materialism

Confirmed Plenary Speakers
Dorothy Thompson
Brian Manning
Bryan D Palmer

Confirmed Speakers

Colin Barker
A modern moral economy: Edward Thompson and Valentin Volosinov meet in a North Manchester protest'

Trevor Bark
Crime Becomes Custom - Custom Becomes Crime

David Camfield, York University, Toronto
"Thompsonian" Theory, the Working Class and Modern Social Movements

Laurence Cox, Department of Sociology, National University of Ireland, Maynooth Thinking "the social movement"

Neil Davidson
Regional Peasant Revolt and Religious Radicalism during the Scottish Bourgeois Revolution

James Green, Professor of History and Labor Studies, University of Massachusetts
The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements

Lesley Hardy
History, Politics and Tradition

James Holstun, SUNY, Buffalo
Brian Manning and the Dialectics of Revolt

Philip Hunter
Class, Agency and Struggle in British Marxist Historiography: Some Lessons for the study of Social Movements

Alan Johnson, Edge Hill College, England
Christopher Hill and the study of social movement leadership

Geoff Kennedy, York University, Toronto
Digger Radicalism and Agrarian Capitalism

Wade Matthews, University of Strathclyde
The Poverty of Strategy: Socialism and the British Marxists

Professor John Mcilroy and Professor Alan Campbell, University of Manchester
The Communist Party Historians Group and Problems in Communist Party historiography

Viv Mackay, University of Southampton
Labour Disputes as Contentious Politics: Refiguring the 1928 Garment Workers Strike at the London "Rego" Factory

Antonio Negro, State University of Campinas, Brasil
A Limited Number of Ideas for an Unlimited Social History. Notes on Brazilian Trends

Alf Nilsen, University of Bergen, Norway
Marxist and Postmodern Perspectives on Social Movements

Mi Park, London School of Economics
Ideology and Lived Experience: A case study of Revolutionary Movements in South Korea, 1980-1995'

Dave Renton, TUC Education
English Experiences: The problem of Nationalism in the Work of the British Marxist Historians

Anneke Ribberink, History Dept, Free University, Amsterdam
Leading Ladies and Cause Minders: The Silent Generation and the Second Feminist Movements

Jess Rigelhaupt, University of Michigan
"The Paradox of a Jim Crow Navy": The Post Chicago Mutiny, The Communist Party, and the California Civil Rights Movement

Richard Romain and Edur Valasco, Associate Professor, University of Toronto and Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana
Continental Integration, Neoliberalism and the Mexican Working Class

Sean Scalmer, Macquarie University, Australia
The Problem of Decline: Demobilisation and Fracturing of Working Class Politics

Hira Singh, Department of Sociology, York University
Anti-Fuedal, Anti-Colonial Protests in India: Structure, Tradition, Ideology

Roger Spalding, Edge Hill College of Higher Education
EP Thompson and the Popular Front

Frehiwot Tesfaye
The Relevance of the Contributions of E.P. Thompson and Rodney Hilton in Understanding Ethiopian Society and History

Stephen Woodhams, Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck College
New wine in old bottles: the transformation of a generation

Conference Themes
How might the extraordinary body of historical writing produced by the 'British Marxist historians' - Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, Dona Torr, John Saville, Dorothy Thompson, George Rudé and others - enable scholars and activists to better understand the making of social movements? This is a timely moment to examine their legacy. Many social movement scholars are pushing beyond the static 'models' drawn from rational-choice theory and the crude and reductive 'new movement'/'old movement' dichotomies developed by European social theory. What can social movement scholars and activists learn from a critical engagement with the historiography of movement and protest in the writings of the British Marxist historians? And from the theoretical and conceptual innovations developed through their history writing? What might be learnt from the sensibility and style of the British Marxist historians, from their 'committed' social and political relation to their subject, to their writing of history 'from the bottom up'? And what can social movement studies - now in an exciting period of sustained growth, connected to the rebirth of popular protest, and a locus for fruitful academic-activist dialogue - bring to this exchange?

We invite proposals for papers, which explore any aspect of the legacy of the British Marxist historians for the study of popular protest and social movements. Themes include:

• Theorising social movements
• Class, gender, 'race' and social movement
• The cultural and moral mediation of protest and movement,
• Agency and the individual-in-the-movement,
• Ideology, discourse and the study of social movements
• 'The People' and protest
• Protest as ethic
• The leadership of social movements
• Revolutions and social movements
• The 'primitive rebel'
• Using sources to study social movements
• Literature and the study of protest
• Gramsci and the British Marxist Historians

Offers of Papers

FINAL DEADLINE FOR 400 WORD PROPOSALS: MARCH 1 2002

Email offers of papers to the conference organiser johnsona@edgehill.ac.uk or write to Alan Johnson. Offers of papers should not be more than 400 words long and should be submitted by 1 March 2002. Full papers, maximum length 8,000 words, must be submitted by 6 May 2002 to enable their advance distribution to conference participants. The conference organiser will actively pursue publication of a selection of conference papers.

Conference Arrangements

Edge Hill College of Higher Education is situated just outside the market town of Ormskirk, 30 miles from Liverpool and Manchester, and twenty minutes from the seaside resort of Southport. From Manchester Airport, a train can be taken to Ormskirk Station, changing at Preston Station.

The cost of the full conference package will be £130 (en suite room) or £100 (standard room), which will include accommodation, conference fees, conference papers, refreshments, lunches, evening meals. Further details of costs are listed on the attached downloadable booking form. Please return the booking form and payment to Marcy McNally, Secretary to the Social Movements Research Group, Centre for the Study of the Social Sciences, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, St Helens Road, Ormskirk, Lancashire, England L39 4QP.

On behalf of the Conference Organising Committee:

Matthew Beaumont
Pembroke College, Oxford University and Historical Materialism Journal

Keith Flett
London Socialist Historians Group

Alan Johnson
Edge Hill College of Higher Education Social Movements Research Group and Historical Materialism Journal (conference organiser)

Stephen Woodhams
Socialist History Society