Remembering Social Movements: Activism and Memory

Remembering Social Movements offers a comparative historical examination of the relations between social movements and collective memory.A detailed historiographical and theoretical review of the field introduces the reader to five key concepts to help guide analysis: repertoires of contention, historical events, generations, collective identities, and emotions. The book examines how social movements act to shape public memory as well as how memory plays an important role within social movements through 15 historical case studies, spanning labour, feminist, peace, anti-nuclear, and urban movements, as well as specific examples of ‘memory activism’ from the 19th century to the 21st century. These include transnational and explicitly comparative case studies, in addition to cases rooted in German, Australian, Indian, and American history, ensuring that the reader gains a real insight into the remembrance of social activism across the globe and in different contexts. The book concludes with an epilogue from a prominent Memory Studies scholar.Bringing together the previously disparate fields of Memory Studies and Social Movement Studies, this book systematically scrutinises the two-way relationship between memory and activism and uses case studies to ground students while offering analytical tools for the reader.

About the Author

Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, Germany. He is also executive chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr, and an honorary professor at Cardiff University in theUK. His books on social movements include (with Holger Nehring) The History of Social Movement in Global Perspective (2017).

Sean Scalmer is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His books on social movements and politics include Dissent Events (2002), Activist Wisdom (2006), Gandhi in the West (2011), On the Stump (2017), and Democratic Adventurer (2020).

Christian Wicke is Assistant Professor of Political History at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He wrote Helmut Kohl’s Quest for Normality (2015). He recently edited (with Ulf Teichmann) an issue of Arbeit-Bewegung-Geschichte on the relationship between ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements (2018/III).