Abolition Struggles and Archives
Wednesday 18th November 6-8pm BST
Saturday 21 November 1-4pm BST
Join us for a series of workshops where we will be pooling our collective knowledge around current and historical abolitionist struggles. Led by Hajera Begum and Azfar Shafi (Abolitionist Futures) the first workshop will provide an insight into recent abolitionist organising and outline what abolition could look like in the British context. The workshop will cover struggles against police, prisons and immigration policing, and the work of building and rooting abolitionist and emancipatory politics – with organisers from the Reclaim Holloway campaign and campaigners against immigration policing.
Recently we have been developing an archival collection around prison abolition and police abolition. This is in it’s early stages but we are inviting those attending the workshop to bring contribution that you think might be relevant to this collection or speaks to your own work. We mean material in the broadest sense of the world – it could be a poster, meme, note, flyer, audio recording, pamphlet, gif etc.
During the second half of the workshop we will be showing you the archival material we have been gathering as part of our online archive Leftove.rs. Then we will be discussing how this and the material that you bring can be turned into an online resource about abolitionist struggles past and present. A second session on Saturday 21 November 1-4pm GMT will involve delving into our personal archives and May Day Rooms online collections to generate an online scrapbook together.
If you would like to send any documents in advance please send them to in-formation@maydayrooms.org and we can share them on the screen during the session.
To sign up click here
Pandemic Notes Workshops and Workbook
Thanks to everyone that sent audio and written contributions to Pandemic Notes. We have now collected over 30 contributions and given that a second lockdown is coming we are inviting you to send more!
As many of you wondered what we would do with all these contributions here’s what we’ve been plotting the last few months. We are working on a practical workbook synthesising the answers we have received to the Pandemic Notes survey with input from activists and researchers that are looking into the dominant themes that appeared in the contributions. We are hoping to create a future resource, which will look into the different responses of communities and workers during the pandemic, as well as giving voice to the emotions and fears people are facing, thinking through our political organising during and after the pandemic. We are working closely with members of groups and organisations that have been in the forefront of organising since the health crisis started, collecting their experiences and thoughts. Keep an eye on our newsletter for the workbook and its launch in 2021!
Health Autonomy
Wednesday 21st October & Saturday 24th October
In light of the ongoing pandemic, we have been searching online archives for radical responses to healthcare around the world. We’ve found a wealth of materials, from the Black Panther organised Free Health Clinics, the self-organised pharmacies and clinics movement in Greece, to hospital occupations in the UK, and more! Through this material we can explore the different types of community responses to healthcare and see how self-managed organisations operate within a vacuum of adequate state provisions, how campaigns maintain and extend existing provisions of care, as well as transforming it along more radical lines. Building on these questions and using the material we’ve collected we will be running a workshop over the course of two days to discuss the archive, learn about current struggles, and try to create a public resource for future political organising.
During corona times we have been experimenting with online collaborative tools to help build archival collections and create new ways of interrogating the material. As part of this workshop we will be using collective FLOSS tools, such as Hot Glue and Etherpads, to explore how we can co-create material online together. The archival pieces in the collection and annotations will then be turned into a scrapbook and hosted as part of our digital archive leftove.rs.
This workshop is by invite only. However if you are really interested or have material you would like to contribute please email in-formation@maydayrooms.org and we’ll see if we can fit you in!
Archiving Radical Spaces
Saturday 17th October, 3-5pm
Social centres, info-shops, squats and collective spaces are key points of distribution and organising for radical politics. However, they are often just footnotes in archival collections, filling up the listing pages with the address of a meeting or event. We want to start building a collection around these spaces documenting their histories, processes of self-organisation and the movements they supported.
Join us for an online archival session, where we want to pool our collective knowledge around these spaces and create an archival resource. We encourage people to bring materials from their own collections and personal histories. Have a look at the list we have been compiling of spaces in the UK: https://textb.org/t/radical_spaces_edit/
During corona times we have been experimenting with online collaborative tools to help build archival collections and create new ways of interrogating the material. As part of this workshop we will be using collective FLOSS tools, such as Hot Glue and Etherpads, to explore how we can co-create material online together. The archival pieces in the collection and annotations will then be turned into a scrapbook and hosted as part of our digital archive leftove.rs.
Take over the City! with London Renters Union Library
Tuesday 28th July, 7-9pm
As part of our scrapbook series we have teamed up with London Renters Union Library to create a collection of materials around rent strikes to help support LRU’s current campaign Can’t Pay Won’t Pay. To build this collection we will be running an online archival session where people can look through bits of the archive, read and discuss how rent strikes of the past can help inform contemporary housing struggles. Using collective FLOSS tools such as Hot Glue and Etherpad we will be experimenting with how we can co-create material online together. We will be taking clippings, help write collective annotations to accompany the material, and much more.
The archival pieces in the collection and annotations will then be created into a scrapbook and added to our blog. The collection will be ultimately housed on our digital archive platform leftove.rs as well as become part of the LRU Library.
Find more info here
