From Tea Parties to Free Speech Zones: Activism and American Culture

Saturday October 30th, 9:00am to 5:30pm

at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West (at 77th Street)

This one-day conference explores the connections, disjunctions, and collisions between U.S. culture and political activism. Some of the questions we will be asking will include (but not be limited to): how does activism get defined and named? How do representations of activist movements shift along historical, generic, and/or ideological boundaries (for example, how is one person's riot another's uprising?)? Is activism inextricable from explicitly political action? How do race, gender, class, religion, region, and other categories of identity shape activist movements? What are the relationships between popular action and "the authorities"?

Panels throughout the day will address these questions and more in explorations of rebellions, strikes, riots, and nonviolent protest, as well as more broadly defined forms of activism: performative, pedagogic, artistic, literary, and even eccentric.