AFPP 2022

Alternative Futures & Popular Protest

AFPP 2022 basic logo

Final Conference Announcements

The 26th edition of AFPP will run online from 13-15th June 2022.

  • You can see the original Call for Papers here.
  • Registration is open for presenters and for non-presenting delegates.
  • The Full Porgramme has now been published.

The inaugural Colin Barker Best Paper Prize

AFPP 2022 sees the launch of the ‘Colin Barker Best Paper Prize’ for the best postgraduate/unwaged paper presented at AFPP. Colin Barker, along with Mike Tyldesley, founded AFPP in 1995. The warm friendly welcome he extended to conference participants, and his intellectual generosity, shaped the spirit of AFPP for more than two decades. He will be remembered for the enthusiastic support he gave to postgraduate and early career participants, something that many of us attending today have benefitted from. In his memory, this prize will recognise and continue to encourage the next generation of social movement scholars at AFPP. The prize winner will receive one of Colin’s books and £100 of vouchers.

Plenaries

We have three plenaries, one of which is a hybrid event on the University of Manchester campus, and all are open to the wider public (please feel free to pass this information on). If you are attending on campus, please let us know by additionally registering on the Eventbrite page linked below (timings in BST, = UTC+1)

Monday 3.30 – 5pm, Disruption, Disobedience and Creativity
Paul Routledge, Aylwyn Walsh, Dani Abulhawa, Nicola Hollinshead

This roundtable brings together scholar activists and arts activism practitioners to discuss the role of arts activism in the current conjuncture, one marked by the convergence of economic, social, political and ecological crises. It coincides with the launch of the Arts Activism Toolkit, that emerged from #ImaginingOtherwise – a recent AHRC funded project on participatory arts education for social change in South Africa.
On campus location: Samuel Alexander Building, Room A101 (Campus map: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/maps/interactive-map/?id=63)
For further details, and to register to attend in person, please see: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/disruption-disobedience-and-creativity-tickets-351108072697
Note: At the request of some of the event’s speakers, we ask that all participants attending in-person kindly wear face coverings unless medically exempt from doing so.

Tuesday 3.30 – 5pm, Chile: Towards a Laboratory of Social Change?
Carlos Ruiz Encina, Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Lieta Vivaldi Macho, Victor Orellana Calderon, Ivette Hernandez Santibañez

For the last two years, Chile has been on its path towards historic changes that make the possibility that the country, which has been widely acknowledged as the first laboratory of neoliberalism, also become the place where neoliberalism will die. In October 2019, large-scale protests across the country, known as the Estallido Social, emerged to fight injustice and inequality, and opened up the political opportunity to replace Pinochet’s constitution through a fully elected constitutional assembly with gender parity and set quotas for Indigenous people’s delegates. Last December 2021, Gabriel Boric, a former student leader, was elected as Chile’s president. Boric’s victory could be seen as the legacy of the Chilean student movement that provided a framework to understand this shift. This panel reflects on the legacy of the Chilean student movement to pave the way for Boric’s promise to bury the legacy of the neoliberal economic model once and for all comes true. It addresses questions on the relationship between the government and social movements, the nature of radical changes in politics led by the Chilean student movement, the role of the Constitutional Assembly in the success of the new government, and the lessons for the left worldwide.
This is a fully online event, so no need for further registration for AFPP delegates. Non-delegates may attend by registering through Eventbrite.
Further details: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/chile-towards-a-laboratory-of-social-change-tickets-359545358847

Wednesday 11.15am – 12.45pm, Social Movements and Anti-Racism
Trevor Ngwane, Meghan Tinsley, Alana Lentin, John Narayan, Scarlet Harris

In one of few empirical accounts of anti-racist organising in Britain, Alana Lentin (2004) highlights that anti-racism has rarely been considered a serious topic of scholarly concern. In the years since Lentin’s study was conducted, we have witnessed a burgeoning interest in anti-racist practices within the academy and academic scholarship, and perhaps more importantly, the last two years have seen some of the most significant waves of global anti-racist protest on record. Yet research focusing on anti-racist activists, movements, and mobilisations remains surprisingly underdeveloped, constrained by the silos of ‘social movement studies’ on the one hand, and ‘race and ethnicity studies’ on the other. Anti-racist practices within universities often remain disconnected from broader anti-racist mobilisations, while research in social movement studies has tended to neglect the structuring power of ‘race’ and the material realities of racism within and beyond movements. This session will bring together scholars and activists working at the intersections of social movement studies, ‘race’/racism studies and anti-racisms.
This is a fully online event, so no need for further registration for AFPP delegates. Non-delegates may attend by registering through Eventbrite.
Further details: afpp@manchester.ac.uk so we can get booking numbers correct.