Echoes of protest: untold stories of the 1984–1985 UK Miners’ Strike (original) (raw)
Related papers
Female Involvement in the Miners’ Strike 1984-1985: Trajectories of Activism
Sociological Research Online, 2007
This paper is based on recent primary research interviews with women who were active in the 1984-1985 miners’ strike. The paper claims that one depiction of women's engagement in the strike has been privileged above others: activist women were miners’ wives who embarked on a linear passage from domesticity and political passivity into politicisation and then retreated from political engagement following the defeat. This depiction is based on a masculinist view which sees political action as organisationally based and which fails to recognise the importance of small scale and emotional political work which women did and continue to undertake within their communities. In reality many women were politically active and aware prior to the dispute though not necessarily in a traditional sense. Women's activism is characterised by continuity: those women who have maintained activism were likely to have been socially and/or politically active prior to the dispute.
International Labor and Working-Class History, 2009
This paper explores the gendered concept of community with reference to the activism of women during the UK 1984–1985 miners’ strike. Drawing on texts from the period and reflective discussions twenty years later with women associated with the strike, it interrogates the ways in which the idea of community was used to accommodate the activism of women. We argue that the apparently gender-neutral ideal of mining community carried meanings that had ambiguous political implications for the women and that the strike highlighted paradoxes that question established understanding of female strike activism.
Nothing Is Lost for History: Narrating Social Protest
Democratic Crisis revisited, 2022
My article poses the question, how to narrate social protest practices to enhance their capacity to enact social change? It reflects on the relation between the narration of social practice and how its agency is perceived. It thus stresses the constitutive role of narration for the agency of social protest. The central claim of the article is that practices and their impact need to be detected, identified and named in order to appear and become seizable. The article rereads the book “Hope in the dark” by Rebecca Solnit (2016) through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s approach to social history and exemplified in the figure of the ragpicker. Most documentation of social protest follows traditional ways of historiography: isolating movements from one another, fetishizing them like a product brand, concentrating on actors (subjects behind the deeds), their intentionality, and dating the movements on a chronological timeline. Yet the power of social protest remains undetected in these reports. The article argues that this power lies in modes of functioning that counteract subject-based history telling, by deconstructing the standard link between agent and action and it also counteracts chronological time by deconstructing standard narratives. The lens of Walter Benjamin’s concept of history and his figure of the ragpicker allows us to see how a different narrative can allow for an empowering paradigm of narrating social protest practices: (1) First, by reading social movement and civic protest practices in a different unchronological time structure without dates, (2) second, by reading it from a different geographic perspective, a border transgressive and inclusive perspective (3) third, by widening the frame of the concept of the political beyond salience and the quantity of actor involvement and polarization (4) and fourth by taking into account the activism, the actual action without looking at the actors behind the acts thus without presupposing the condition of shared identities, as class, sex or race etc., as fundamental for political action. As such seemingly failed events of progressive political action - i.e. action aimed at equality and awareness for the needs of the disempowered – can be re-signified. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin, the article challenges and defies the manner in which history is transmitted as it repeats persisting power relations and understands its task to brush history against the grain.
Reassembling the "People’s History": Curating labour activism through Itineraries
Cultural Roads and Itineraries: Concepts and Cases, 2021
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9789811635328 In this research, it was discovered that the grassroots, communal, and engaging nature and activist content of labour walking tours incited a critical community dialogue that formed a discourse of resistance. In essence, three thematic narratives emerged in this cultural itinerary: (1) examination and reflection of the dominant government-sponsored cultural narrative; (2) insertion of missing and excluded local narratives that highlight vulnerable groups; and (3) community confidence and empowerment through the nostalgic reminiscence of past triumphs. Using the notion of cultural itineraries, this article illustrates how labour walking tours have been able to empower the public by reassembling, connecting, and ascribing an alternative meaning through curating activism within the community. By examining labour walking tours, each case study reveals an alternative cultural image and identity for a community that is beset by the dominant government narrative. More than this, the cultural itinerary acts as both a resistance and a reappropriation of a lost and excluded identity for its local and visiting public. Participants not only walk away with knowledge about its past, but they also form an intimate connection with its heritage while being empowered with a sense of pride.
‘You have us riled up!’: Women’s role in a 2001 miners’ strike
2008
In April 2001, in the small Queensland town of Coaltown, a group of women found themselves standing on the road, jeering and cheering at cars passing by in the 4am cold on the way to the mine, as their husbands fought a bitter battle with the company around the issue of twelve hour shifts and the massive introduction of contract labour.