This June, University of Manchester, will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Alternative Futures and Popular Protest conference. The conference was first launched in 1995 by Colin Barker and Mike Tyldesley when they brought together an international gathering of scholars and activists in Manchester to try to make sense of the ways in which movements strive towards a better world.
For the next 20 years this hugely successful series of international conferences was organised by Colin and Mike at Manchester Metropolitan University. Hundreds of scholars and activists from over sixty countries came through AFPP over the years with highly established scholars participating on an equal footing to PhD students and early career researchers. Discussions developed during conference sessions often flow into coffee breaks, dinners and sometimes long into the evening. In 2018, Colin and Mike, by then both retired, approached colleagues attached to the research group movements@manchester to discuss the future of AFPP and we were pleased to take on the responsibility of carrying this tradition forwards.
This year’s conference will take place between the 16th and 18th June. We’ll have around 100 presentations this year on the broad conference themes of: contemporary or historical movements and protests from any global region; theories of social movements, labour movements and revolution; utopias, experiments in alternative living and everyday politics; ideologies, imaginaries and strategies of collective action; opposition to discrimination and confrontations with capitalism, patriarchy or coloniality. We will have two plenaries bringing together academic and activist speakers, focusing on climate justice activism and Palestine solidarity movements. For registration details, see the Eventbrite listing.
To celebrate AFPP’s 30th anniversary, we will be using the conference as a moment to reflect on the past and look forward, again, to a better future. To help with this we would love to collect stories, testimonials, and memories from your experiences of AFPP. So, if you have something to share, please head over to the testimonials page.