Histories of Protest and Social Movements

Abstract

It has become something of a truism that whenever and wherever power is exercised and manifest it is always met with contestation and resistance. It was arguably not until the late 1970s, though, that historical geography began to take the study of protest seriously. The spurs to action were several. Armed decolonial struggles in Africa and parts of South Asia, a wave of violence in American ghettos in the late 1960s, and the concurrent student uprising in Paris (and other cities) in 1968 all brought social protest into the public consciousness in newly stark ways. Against the pressing problems that such conflicts highlighted, and against the need to understand the politics and the place of such powerful movements, human geographers’ obsession with the abstract numerical modeling of spatial science lacked meaningful answers. The founding of the radical geography journal Antipode in 1969 and the concurrent publication of David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City arguably opened the intellectual space in geography to study the impact of economic (and political) change on those who had to labor to get by. Likewise, the intellectual influence of “history from below” approaches, not least the work of E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, offered a model to historical geographers of how to analyze the geographies of both everyday life and exceptional moments of contention. Similarly, the emergent body of work in the Subaltern Studies movement, with its foundational emphasis on everyday forms of peasant resistance, provided encouragement to geographers to think about the impact of not just capitalism but also imperialism on the poor. Research on protest at first was dominated by dramatic moments and (loosely organized) movements. A reflection of these influences, such work was, and remains to this day, highly interdisciplinary, with geographers often working closely with those from other disciplines on spatially sensitive studies of protests past in asking where did protest happen, why did it happen there, and how did space and place shape protest. Further, such analyses have proven to be remarkably temporally diverse, ranging from the medieval to the recent past. Work on social movements—as opposed to protest movements—has taken a different trajectory. Drawing upon a different set of influences, notably from political science and sociology, geographers were slower to take the study of social movements seriously. This worked both ways: social movement studies was also slow to consider space as something more than the isotropic backdrop to the real stuff of politics and activism. Indeed, Bryon Miller’s landmark monograph Geography and Social Movements could meaningfully note the “missing geography” in the study of social movements, to which one might also add the missing geographers. As Hannah Awcock has noted in an important recent review of the field, scholars of the spaces and spatiality of past protest and social movements have tended to overlook critical contributions on feminist, gay, and black movements from beyond the discipline.