Creating worlds together: A workshop on Experimentations and Protest Camps

On November 2, 2011 the Protest Camps Research Network will be hosting a public workshop as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science. The workshop, held at Birkbeck College, University of London, will explore the experimental politics and communities of protest camps like Occupy, Balcombe and Tahrir Square.

Why protest camps?

In 2011 tents took over the streets from Cairo to London, bringing 'protest camps' into popular conversation. Heightened by the speed of online networks, city occupations became a global media and protest phenomenon. Yet protest camps neither started nor ended with Tahrir Square and the global Occupy movement. From the Australian Aboriginal Tent Embassy, to the UK’s Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and Non-stop Picket, protest camps have a long, transnational history. Likewise, protest camps continue to pop-up today. In Turkey, Occupy Gezi made national headlines, while more locally, we saw a Mass Sleep Out against the Bedroom Tax and the Balcombe Community Protection Camp against fracking.

Whether in Istanbul or Sussex, protest camps are experimental acts requiring imagination, mapping and building. They traverse territories of outside and inside, turning how we live into a political question. They are sites for creative exploration; places where people imagine and invent alternative forms of living together.

This interactive workshop invites you to engage with these experimental worlds through a series of discussions and activities. Led by research experts on protest camps and alternative politics, together we will explore how protest camps encourage new ways of living and relating as they bring people together around common goals.

*A note about mobility and access: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/mybirkbeck/services/facilities/disability/access/clore-management-centre

Illustration Credit: Matt Kenyon http://www.mattkenyon.co.uk/

More Details on the Workshop

Showing how interdisciplinary social science research can theoretically and empirically explore protest camps, this workshop introduces themes of democracy, territory and governance to help understand the contemporary practices, and organisational and political histories of protest camping.

Working with members of the Protest Camps Research Collective (Dr Gavin Brown, Dr Anna Feigenbaum, Dr Uri Gordon, Dr Anja Kanngieser and Dr Jenny Pickerill), you will learn about the research being undertaken on different protest camps. Together we will engage in fun, hands-on tasks, exploring, mapping out and enacting the organisational infrastructures of a camp - from sanitation planning to decision-making structures. The workshop leaders will draw on their research, interweaving a history of innovative tactics drawn from the past three decades of protest camping into the group discussions.

This workshop extends the social sciences by exploring the creative forms of ‘reflexive’ and participant-observation methodologies our researchers engage. We will discuss how co-operating with movement participants embeds our research in the learning processes between protest camps and related forms of alternative world-making. The approach we take aims to influence future protest architectures to help maximise both their specific policy impacts and their more general function of experimenting with democratic political forms.

The Festival of Social Science is run by the Economic and Social Research Council and takes place from 2-9 November 2013. With events from some of the country's leading social scientists, the Festival celebrates the very best of British social science research and how it influences our social, economic and political lives - both now and in the future. This year’s Festival of Social Science has over 170 creative and exciting events across the UK to encourage businesses, charities, government

agencies, schools and college students to discuss, discover and debate topical social science issues. Press releases detailing some of the varied events and a full list of the programme are available at the Festival website. You can now follow updates from the Festival on twitter using #esrcfestival.

Our Books

Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409440642

Protest Camps http://zedbooks.co.uk/paperback/protest-camps

Anarchy Alive http://anarchyalive.com/about-the-book/

Follow us on twitter:

Protest Camps – the book @protestcamps

Jenny Pickerill @jennypickerill

Gavin Brown @lestageog

Anna Feigenbaum @drfigtree

For more information on the Protest Camps Research Collective: http://protestcamps.org/about/research-collective-bios/