Afterlives of Protest: The Protest Memory Research Network

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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?