Afterlives of Protest: The Protest Memory Research Network

This is a particularly timely moment to examine how protest memory might act as a site of knowledge, citizenship and creativity for a wide range of interested parties. We live in times of upheaval, with clear shifts in the prevailing norms and a strong distrust in traditional politics and expertise. We are also experiencing transformations in the nature of protest, which is becoming increasingly individualised and yet more pervasive and mediated. How protest is remembered, recovered and recycled, and by whom, is critical to explore.

By evoking the 'afterlives of protest', we are interested in the expanded temporalities and spatialities of protest. This includes the examination of not just heightened moments of resistance taking place in the public sphere, but also banal articulations of radical pasts in the everyday and how memories associated with social movements circulate in a range of creative and medial contexts.

Discussion and knowledge exchange activities between academics, heritage managers, artists and activists/campaigners are vital to the work of the network, as multiple stakeholder perspectives are needed to understand the creative and cultural value of protest, and how diverse and 'risky' legacies of protest can be managed publicly and privately.

To achieve these objectives, our network will:

1. Identify and connect new theoretical, conceptual and methodological frameworks for exploring protest memory as an inter-disciplinary and (sub-/trans-) national object of study. How is protest memory understood?
2. Chart the ways in which protest memories move (spatially, temporally, medially) by identifying the social practices, cultural/heritage industries and organisational actors that are the custodians, curators and circulators of protest memory. Where does protest memory stop and go?
3. Understand the memorability of protest through sharing research and practice on the embodied, affective and material dynamics of protest as creativity, storytelling, and performance. Why are some protest memories not forgotten?
4. Explore protest memory and its transmission as a form of social learning about past practices of resistance to explore how we might draw on these to build both informal and formal protest knowledge. Our idea here is that the deep, time-rich and embodied practices of protest can and should be shared, materialised and mobilised for re-imagining resistance. What can we learn from protest memory?

In our workshops, conference and website, we aim to assist in the building and curation of protest memory research in order to contribute to a more plural, cultural and social understanding of protest. The network will provide a unique, interdisciplinary and international opportunity for practitioners/activists, and curators/museums to consider the contribution of protest memory to their work and activities. Multiple forms of expertise, engagement and knowledge generation will be built into the entire research process. Our impact activities are targeted at the successful achievement of these goals via:

PROJECT WEBSITE AND PROMOTIONAL WORK will disseminate the contribution of the network and stimulate public debate by enacting 'distributed expertise' through co-produced activities and outputs. The wider public will have the opportunity to engage with the resources on the website, its media and with outcomes, with added interaction through social media. We will also explore visual ways of presenting network activities to wider publics, such as the content curation tool Storify.

Each network workshop will be captured in BLOG POSTINGS so that key discussion points and findings can be easily disseminated in a creative format. The accessibility of our reporting on the network activities will appeal to activists, curators and museums seeking short and engaging dialogue on protest memorability, art and activism. Such content will be co-produced with our advisory group.

The EXHIBITION/DISPLAY of the network activities and protest memories will provide opportunities for the circulation of new visual materials and narratives of protest, with the aim to reach a wide audience. These materials will be exhibited at the capstone conference and within a small gallery space at The People's History Museum.

CULTURAL MEMORY POLICY REFLECTIONS - in terms of policy beneficiaries, our network will provide a significant interdisciplinary and multi-sector perspective on protest, activism and campaign culture through memory work and the arts. We seek to reach cultural and memory policy audiences through our contacts with European and non-European memory, heritage and identity policy research/action such as the EU Cultural Base and the Brazilian UNESCO MIL-CLICKS social media movement. Through the circulation of our policy reflections at the end of the project (as a cultural memory policy of protest research), our aim is to garner the insights of protest/social movement researchers, practitioners and cultural actors and facilitate further contributions from organizations that respond to our reflections. Given our ultimate goal of extending this network into a larger project, our consultation will bring significant potential to establish a longer-term collaboration that bridges academic research and protest memory practice.