It feels like a long time ago since three UCU members witnessed the treatment of young people on a demonstration for the right to access education. We wrote a report on what we had seen, collectively and with urgency. It has definitely informed a lot of my work and thinking since. In particular it inspired my involvement with the Subcultures Network which aimed to uphold some of the agency afforded to young people in the earlier models of subcultural resistance, but with a more nuanced twist. The experience of witnessing the protest and writing the report also greatly informed my thinking about publics and the crowd that went into my 80s book, most notably work by John Drury.
When it was published the police were very disappointed in us –
“We have serious reservations about the methodology and academic rigour, given its quick publication and the researchers’ reluctance to engage with a key party to the events.”
“We take very seriously our legal and moral duties to carefully balance people’s right to peacefully protest with our duty to protect the public. We are extremely disappointed that the same balance has not been applied to the undertaking of this research.
Which we felt was slightly unfair as there was a mirror project working on police experiences elsewhere in Brighton and the ethics advice had been to separate this from the experiences of young people. My own university made a statement distancing themselves from the content of my research – which is nice because I’m not sure they are usually that aware of what I do. Young people were condemned in the local newspaper and by the bloggers who post on local paper’s website: they were trouble-seeking truants, looters, criminals, too stupid for university, and “feral”, the adjective of choice for children who do not, for a host of reasons, conform. Which all seemed to me to rather prove our point.
As our times have moved on, on the protests of 2010 and 2011 have been superseded by other moments of unrest not least #BLM, and the Report has now become officially historical. It is an example of how historians at the time were working out to apply the historians’ craft to new social media forms, in this case Twitter and Youtube, and what ethical approaches we should be led by. We use the Report as evidence in our first year History module The History of Now in which students collectively write the history of the 21st century through three intertwined layers of the history of the discipline, the documenting of events, and their own lives.
Because the Report is quite long if you wanted to use it for teaching I recommend choosing one of the following for source analysis.
- ‘Introduction’ (pp. 5-13)
- ‘Hove Town Hall’ (pp. 58-62)
- One other event of your choice – you might choose a location that you recognise for example
- ‘Kettling’ (pp. 73-75)
Alongside the following historical work:
CAPPE originally hosted the report but the link is no longer available. But luckily enough we have the Wayback Machine