30 years of Alternative Futures & Popular Protest

We are delighted to announce the call for AFPP 2025, marking 30 years since Colin Barker and Mike Tyldesley first brought an international gathering of scholars and activists to Manchester to try to make sense of the ways in which movements strive towards a better world. We’re looking forward to marking this anniversary with you at the conference, as a moment to reflect on the past and look forward – again – to a better future.

To aid in our reflections, we’d love to collect stories, testimonials or memories from your experiences of AFPP. If you have something to share, please head over to the testimonials page. 

AFPP 2025 Call for Papers

AFPP is an international, cross-disciplinary conference on social movements, protest and cognate topics. It has drawn participants from over 60 countries, whether based in departments of sociology, politics, cultural studies, psychology, economics, history, geography or elsewhere. Discussions are marked by a long-established spirit of collegial and comradely participation, making for a friendly meeting ground between academia and activism.

The 2025 conference will be held in Manchester on 16-18th June. We look forward to welcoming delegates to the city, with all of the informal socialising, organising, and collaborating that that format entails. To help cover the costs of an in-person conference, we will be charging a delegate fee. The amount is still to be confirmed, but will be broadly in line with the 2024 fee of £45.

We invite offers of papers relevant to the broad conference theme, which might address such matters as:

• 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

To offer a paper, please send a title, abstract (max 300 words) and 4-6 keywords to the organisers via the [abstract submission link required]

If your abstract is accepted you will be invited to supply a written paper in advance of the conference, which will be distributed to all participants. Ideally, this would take the form of a fully-referenced working paper, of 6-8,000 words in length in MS Word .docx, Adobe .pdf or compatible format. However, some speakers have submitted different kinds of documents in the past (e.g. extended notes; powerpoint slideshows and so on). We are open to the submission of such documents instead of a working paper as long as they successfully communicate the main argument and evidence base for your paper without the need for specialist software.

Deadline for receipt of abstracts: 18^th December 2024 via this form. 

Please do not email abstracts, use the submission form instead. We aim to respond by February 2025.

For queries by email: afpp@manchester.ac.uk

The AFPP 2024 Organising Committee are: Josh Bunting, Gemma Edwards, Simin Fadaee, Kevin Gillan, Lidia Yanez Lagos, Steven Speed, Meghan Tinsley, Daniela Fazio Vargas and Luke Yates