Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements: History’s Schools

✍ Scribed by Aziz Choudry; Salim Vally

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 281
• Series: Routledge Advances in Sociology
• Edition: Hardback
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

How do educators and activists in today’s struggles for change use historical materials from earlier periods of organizing for political education? How do they create and engage with independent and often informal archives and debates? How do they ultimately connect this historical knowledge with contemporary struggles?

Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements aims to advance the understanding of relationships between learning, knowledge production, history and social change. In four sections, this unique collection explores:　

• Engagement with activist/movement archives

• Learning and teaching militant histories

• Lessons from liberatory and anti-imperialist struggles

• Learning from student, youth and education struggles

Six chapters foreground insights from the breadth and diversity of South Africa’s rich progressive social movements; while others explore connections between ideas and practices of historical and contemporary struggles in other parts of the world including Argentina, Iran, Britain, Palestine, and the US.

Besides its great relevance to scholars and students of Education, Sociology, and History, this innovative title will be of particular interest to adult educators, labour educators, archivists, community workers and others concerned with education for social change.

✦ Table of Contents

Part 1. Engaging with activist/movement archives

Chapter 1: Working with the past: Making history of struggle part of the struggle

Andrew Flinn (University College London, UK)

Chapter 2: Learning from the Alexander Defence Committee Archives

Archie L. Dick (University of Pretoria, South Africa)

Chapter 3: A lost tale of the student movement in Iran

Mahdi Ganjavi and Shahrzad Mojab (University of Toronto/Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Canada)

Part 2. Learning and teaching militant histories

Chapter 4: Immediate history as personal history: The militant as a historian

Pablo Pozzi (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Chapter 5: Anti-apartheid people’s histories and post-apartheid nationalist biographies

David Johnson (Open University, UK)

Chapter 6: African history in context: Toward a praxis of radical education

Asher Gamedze, Koni Benson and Akosua Koranteng (University of Cape Town, South Africa)　

Part 3. Lessons from liberatory and anti-imperialist struggles

Chapter 7: Tracking the states and the UN: From an Indigenous centre

Sharon H. Venne (Treaty Six/Cree) and Irene Watson (Tanganekald/Meintangk, University of South Australia)

Chapter 8: The legacy of the Palestinian Revolution: Reviving organising for the next generation

Akram Salhab (Independent scholar, UK/Palestine)

Chapter 9: ‘An act of struggle in the present’: History, education and political campaigning by South Asian anti-imperialist activists in the UK

Anandi Ramamurthy (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) and Kalpana Wilson (London School of Economics, UK)

Chapter 10: Learning in struggle: An activist’s view of the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa

Trevor Ngwane (University of Johannesburg, South Africa)

Part 4: Learning from student, youth and education struggles

Chapter 11: Alternative education: Examining past experiences critically

Enver Motala (University of Fort Hare, South Africa)

Chapter 12: Over the rainbow: Third World Studies against the Neoliberal turn

Robin D. G. Kelley (UCLA, USA)

Chapter 13: Alternative imaginaries on US campuses: Revisiting the origins of Black Studies

Martha Biondi (Northwestern University, USA)

Chapter 14: Remixing past and present struggles: cultural activism in the Western Cape, South Africa

Emile Jansen and Paul Hendricks (Independent researchers, Cape Town, South Africa)