Digging Where You Stand: Community-led and Movement Archiving with Andrew Flinn
MayDay Rooms 88 Fleet Street, London, CountyArchiving From Below Discussion Series Drawing on the first English language version of the Swedish author and activist Sven Lindqvist’s influential 1978 workers’ radical history manual (Dig Where You Stand 2023, Repeater Books, ed. by myself & Astrid von Rosen), this discussion will introduce the philosophy and practice embedded in Lindqvist’s workers' DIY history manual, […]
Archival film night: Wages for Housework and beyond! 1970s Feminist Activism on Film in London and NY
MayDay Rooms 88 Fleet Street, London, CountyJoin us at Mayday Rooms for an archival film night to watch and discuss 1970s grassroots feminist activism in NYC and London! Following up on a series of archival film nights earlier this year, this event will use the campaign for Wages for Housework in London and NYC as an entry point […]
Archiving from Below Discussion Series: Archive Stories with Sara Salem and Mai Taha
MayDay Rooms 88 Fleet Street, London, CountyArchive Stories looks at how we can work with creative and non-traditional archives. The project wants to create a space for conversations about archiving beyond institutional archives, and to think through the possibilities that emerge when we imagine the archive as expansive and as encompassing everything around us. What does it mean to […]
Fight Back with the Claimants Union! with Georgia Anderson and Cathy Leech
MayDay Rooms 88 Fleet Street, London, CountyDrawing on an oral history project from MayDay Radio, this session will explore the history of the Claimants Union movement, a radical, grassroots initiative led by and for organised benefits claimants active in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. At its peak, the movement consisted of around 100 autonomous local branches across the country, coordinated […]
Saturday Opening
MayDay Rooms 88 Fleet Street, London, CountyMDR is now open every last Saturday of the month between 2-6pm We know that it is not always possible for some of you to visit our archive during the regular working week, so we have decided to open our doors to the public every last Saturday of the month as well! Upcoming dates are: […]
Archiving from Below Discussion Series: dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
MayDay Rooms 88 Fleet Street, London, CountyFor the first Afb session we will be watching and discussing Johan Grimonprez’s dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, alongside archival videos from MayDay Room’s video archive Activist Media Project. We will explore how video, newsreels, television, and endless streams of moving images on social media of direct action can be archived in ways that create sites of production and can serve as […]
Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity
MayDay Rooms 88 Fleet Street, London, CountyWe are very excited to welcome longtime friends and comrades of MDR, Valeria Graziano, Tomislav Medak and Marcell Mars, to discuss their new book Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity, in conversation with Susan Kelly and Janna Graham. In many places around the world, the freedom to simply care for one another is under attack […]
Listening Event: No Fear! An oral history project on the Student Movement (2010-2012) with MayDay Rooms and On the Record.
MayDay Rooms 88 Fleet Street, London, CountyCelebrating our newly trained Oral Historians! Over 8 sessions, the No Fear! cohort were equipped with archival resources and oral history training to build a new archive representing the experiences and insights of historic and current student activists both here in London and abroad. In light of recent waves of protests and encampments across universities […]
Archiving from Below Discussion Series: All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal: Reading History From Below
MayDay Rooms 88 Fleet Street, London, CountyIn All Knees and Elbows, published in 2012 Tom Roberts and Anthony Iles attempted to recover and politically and critically survey the work of historians contributing to practices of reading and writing 'history from below'. If we articulate the 'below' as populated by creatures marked by material processes of differentiation through race, class and gender, then […]
Archival Film Night for LGBTQ+ History Month: The Archivettes (2019)
MayDay Rooms 88 Fleet Street, London, CountyWhen a group of women in the Gay Academic Union founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in the mid-1970s, they did so in explicit recognition that lesbian herstory ‘was disappearing as quickly as it was being made.’ For over fifty years, through many major milestones in LGBTQ+ history, this entirely volunteer-run organisation has quite literally […]
Big Flame: Building the Movements, New Politics
MayDay Rooms 88 Fleet Street, London, CountyJoin us for an evening with ex-Big Flamers Max Farrar and Kevin McDonnell, who will be discussing their new book, Big Flame: Building the Movements, New Politics, published by Merlin Press. The libertarian socialist organisation Big Flame (active roughly between 1970 and 1985) is notable for its attempt to synthesise the concerns of the women’s […]
Archiving from Below Discussion Series: Archiving as a communist inventory? with Agit Press
MayDay Rooms 88 Fleet Street, London, CountySooner or later everything gets recuperated by our political enemies. Despite their warnings even the situationists were unable to escape this fate. Obviously, we don't give up on militant ideas despite their capture, however we do need to take account of practices and tactics that we inherit from past movements, so as to assess their […]