Around 1968: Activism, Networks, Trajectories

Context 1968 is a common reference point in contemporary society, standing either as a golden moment of radical change, now vanished, or a time of damaging experiments, now fortunately rooted out. Although the debate has gone on since 1968 itself, there is far less scholarly literature on this subject than on the Second World War or Cold War periods in Europe. The project embraces the challenge to historicise the years around 1968, no longer to make political capital out of them, but to reassess the moment as a turning point in the history of the twentieth century.

The project is the first centrally-conceived fully European transnational approach to this topic. Previous comparative studies have either been single-authored works covering only part of Europe, or conference proceedings, by their nature disparate. It will be undertaken by an international research team a dozen strong, built around a core of four researchers who have been working together for five years on a project funded by the European Science Foundation on daily Life in German- and Italian-occupied Europe, published by Berg in June 2006, led by Professor Robert Gildea, Professor of Modern History elect at the University of Oxford. The AHRC research grant is intended to fund primary research by the six UK-based members of the project. They will collaborate with six other European scholars in workshops scheduled for 2007, 2008 and 2009, for which funding has been sought from the Leverhulme Trust. It will link into a project directed by Anette Warring, professor of History at Roskilde University, Denmark, and funded by the Danish Humanities Research council, on Utopia and social criticism in Denmark. The team brings together professors, lecturers and postdoctoral scholars in a path-breaking and exciting enterprise of international research and collaboration.

The project will implement a radical new framework of analysis around the three vectors of activism, networks and trajectories. It will investigate activism by means of a collective biography of activists, but shift the focus from the stars or 'mountain crest' of activists, professional '68s who made careers in politics or the media on the back of their 1968 activities, to a wide cross-section of rank-and-file militants and experimenters. It will rescue the study of the activities of 1968 from sociologists who have conceived of them in terms of 'movements' to focus on clusters of often informal activist networks in each country, networks ranging from the overtly political to those such as communes which experimented with new life-styles. Finally, it will challenge broad narratives which model a shift around 1968 from Utopian dreams to radicalism or from failed revolution to broader cultural revolution, by tracing the trajectories of individual activists between 1965 and 1975 and deriving conclusions from the patterns that emerge.

Wider significance and benefits The project will build a data-base of activists and networks in thirteen European countries and undertake interviews with a broad sample of activists to provide the evidence for the present study and a unique resource for future researchers. The project will have and interactive and interdisciplinary dimension, with two former activists and two sociologists invited to make contributions to the 2008 workshop. The outcome of the project will be primarily academic, but members of the team will generate and participate in a wider public debate commemorating the 40"" anniversary of 1968 in 2008, on the significance of 1968 and the years around it in twentieth-century European history.