Stefan Berger

Sean Scalmer

Christian Wicke

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.

Activism and Memory

Remembering Social Movements

Stuart Macintyre

In the same vein as the Robert Cowley book on British hypothetical histories, What if asks the same questions about Australia's past. Leading Australian historians including Stuart Macintyre, presents counterfactual history.

Australian History as it Might Have Been

What If?

Joy Damousi

Robin Archer

Murray Goot

While the Great War raged, Australians were twice asked to vote on the question of military conscription for overseas service. The recourse to popular referendum on such an issue at such a time was without precedent anywhere in the world. The campaigns precipitated mass mobilisation, bitter argument, a split in the Labor Party, and the fall of a government. The defeat of the proposals was hailed by some as a victory of democracy over militarism, mourned by others as an expression of political disloyalty or a symptom of failed self-government. But while the memory of the conscription campaigns once loomed large, it has increasingly been overshadowed by a preoccupation with the sacrifice and heroism of Australian soldiers - a preoccupation that has been reinforced during the centennial commemorations. This volume redresses the balance. Across nine chapters, distinguished scholars consider the origins, unfolding, and consequences of the conscription campaigns, comparing local events with experiences in Britain, the United States, and other countries. A corrective to the 'militarisation' of Australian history, it is also a major new exploration of a unique and defining episode in Australia's past.

The Conscription Conflict and the Great War

Dennis Altman

Red or Green? Traditionally, Australian progressives have supported the Australian Labor Party; increasingly, The Greens appeal. What are the key differences between the parties? Is greater collaboration desirable? Is it likely? Some progressives remain strongly committed to Labor or The Greens. Others have abandoned one or other of the parties from bitter experience. Others still are genuinely undecided, or seek to promote greater understanding and cooperation. What is the best way forward? This volume brings together a range of party leaders, veterans, and academic experts to tackle these important questions. Deliberately pluralistic, it encompasses strongly divergent views. Dedicated to progressive change, it aims both to capture and to advance a vital public debate. The Age has published this edited extract from a chapter written by Adam Bandt for the book How to Vote Progressive in Australia.

Labor Or Green?

How to Vote Progressive in Australia

Over the last four decades, publicity stunts, demonstrations and audacious displays of moral commitment have become an increasingly familiar part of political life. Within Australia, these have ranged from the pioneering efforts of Student Action For Aborigines, to the campaign against the Vietnam War, and a cluster of social movements organised around gender, race and sexuality. Crucial to these developments has been a persistent interplay between protest action and the media. But how do protesters attract the media's attention, what are the costs of this emphasis on theatre and spectacle, and how does the emergence of the Internet complicate and enrich the means of collective protest? Dissent Events: Protest, the Media and the Political Gimmick in Australia offers a contemporary history of collective action in Australia over the last four decades, from the halting experiments of the early sixties, to more recent actions involving Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party, the quest for reconciliation, and the anti-corporate campaigners of the S11 Alliance. It tells the story of these performances, develops a set of concepts to analyse their changing form and illuminates the larger story of social and political change in recent Australian life.

Protest, the Media, and the Political Gimmick in Australia

Dissent Events

The non-violent protests of civil rights activists and anti-nuclear campaigners during the 1960s helped to redefine Western politics. But where did they come from? Sean Scalmer uncovers their history in an earlier generation's intense struggles to understand and emulate the activities of Mahatma Gandhi. He shows how Gandhi's non-violent protests were the subject of widespread discussion and debate in the USA and UK for several decades. Though at first misrepresented by Western newspapers, they were patiently described and clarified by a devoted group of cosmopolitan advocates. Small groups of Westerners experimented with Gandhian techniques in virtual anonymity and then, on the cusp of the 1960s, brought these methods to a wider audience. The swelling protests of later years increasingly abandoned the spirit of non-violence, and the central significance of Gandhi and his supporters has therefore been forgotten. This book recovers this tradition, charts its transformation, and ponders its abiding significance.

Sean Scalmer

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