Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

Displaced Children and Stolen Babies in Contemporary Spain

This post was contributed by Dr Diana Marre, visiting research fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR). Here, Dr Marre gives an insight into her BISR Event on 29 June 2016: “Displaced Children and Stolen Babies in Contemporary Spain”

On 16 June, ten days before the forthcoming Spanish presidential election, several organisations that represent children and babies who were victims of enforced disappearances in Spain between the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the 1990s, called for a public protest in Madrid using the slogan ‘Stop Francoist impunity’.

This call for public action is one of many that have followed the presentation of two reports to the United Nations Human Rights Council in September 2014. The reports focussed on enforced or involuntary child disappearances during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975), and the transition to the restoration of democracy (1976-1990). They argued that the only efforts to investigate these enforced disappearances were by victims’ families or non-governmental organisations, and noted that not only was the state not contributing to such efforts they had in fact systematically blocked or ignored research into the disappearances. Consequently the total number who have fallen victim to these enforced disappearances remains unknown.

Both reports referred to three groups of victims. Firstly, those who are still in mass graves awaiting exhumation, which consists of around 120,000 unidentified bodies in more than 400 mass graves. Secondly, there are the ‘war children’, who were the sons and daughters of the dead, imprisoned and vanquished during the Civil War and who were either adopted or placed in orphanages or similar institutions. Due to the lack of research, there is no clear data on how many children were victims of this practice. Thirdly, the reports referred to the so-called ‘stolen babies’ of Spain. Most of these babies were born using the practice of ‘twilight birth’ between 1950 and 1990, and were declared to be stillborn or to have died immediately after birth. They were then removed from their families and adopted. These victims were the children of single, poor or illiterate women or young couples with multiple children. Again, it is difficult to know the precise number of ‘stolen babies’, but current estimates suggest there were between 200,000 and 300,000 victims.

About the event

This event will ask why, in Spain, the enforced displacement of children in the ways described above still remains unrecognized and unpunished. We will examine what is considered to be one of the biggest, long-lasting and most wide-spread abductions of underage people, loss of custody by biological families and loss of

identity in the West. As an ex judge of the Spanish National High Court has noted, these enforced disappearances were a result of a ‘peculiar Spanish form of ‘legal’ disappearance of people during the Civil War and post-war period through a pseudo-juridical system that gave ‘legal’ coverage to the systematic abduction system of children’ (Garzón 2008).

This event will examine the role of fear and public secrets – the “unknown knowns” (Simmel 1906) – to achieve the aim of “remembering to forget” (Mookherjee 2006), the objective of the post-Franco dictatorship amnesty laws (1976, 1977), often referred to as the “laws of oblivion”.

Find out more

Event: “Displaced Children and Stolen Babies in Contemporary Spain” (29 June 2016)
Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR)

Works Cited

Garzón, B. (2008), Auto, vol. 53 de 2008 E, Madrid, Administración de Justicia, Juzgado Central de Instrucción n.º 5 Audiencia Nacional.
Mookherjee, N. (2006), ‘Remembering to forget’: public secrecy and memory of sexual violence in the Bangladesh war of 1971, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 433-450.
Simmel, G. (1906), The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies, American Journal of Sociology, 11(4):441-498.

Education Activism Ethics: histories, strategies, economies

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This post was contributed by Dr Nick Beech, Ian Gwinn and Calum Wright – members of the Raphael Samuel History Centre.

On 30 June – 3 July 2016, the Centre will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of the socialist historian Raphael Samuel, along with the fortieth anniversary of the journal he helped to found (History Workshop Journal), with the Radical Histories Conference.

Read other blogs about the conference here and here

A strand within the larger conference has been co-convened under the working title of Education Activism Ethics, concentrating on Raphael Samuel’s legacy of ‘history from below’. The aim is to consider the complex relationships operating between academic and ‘extra-academic’ historical research. A key question raised by the strand concerns the present possibilities and limits of working ‘extra-institutionally’ in political, economic, and ethical terms.

Though the strand includes formal academic paper panels, many of the sessions consist of workshops, roundtables, and other discursive formats. The aim of the strand is to consolidate perspectives on working practical strategies and tactics towards autonomous and self-managed education.

Education Activism Ethics explores ways of doing history which move beyond the confines of the academy and engage wider public audiences, and the challenges such approaches entail both in practical and theoretical terms. Guided walks, social media and blogging; free education, social art, DIY practices, and direct political action offer ways for the radical historian to promote forgotten or marginalised histories and to bring these stories to new audiences. But these practices and modes operate within specific conditions and face particular problems. What are the possibilities opened by history beyond the academy? What ethical conditions are negotiated? What politics are constituted? What economies are required?

Historical Research and Dissemination

Some of the contributions in the strand focus on specific historical research approaches, tools and media. On Friday, we have a panel (titled ‘Labour, Class, Community’) providing readings of history that have been produced from historians working closely with communities and social formations in their localities and conditions. On the other hand, a group of historians (Catherine Fletcher, Laura Sangha, and Brodie Waddell) will present different their different perspectives at the ‘Politics of Doing History Online’ roundtable on Sunday morning, examining the specific possibilities (and present limitations) of conducting internet research and dissemination.

These sessions, we hope, will not only introduce us to specific, unique, histories, but raise questions about the contributions that history can make to public consciousness and empowerment. On mid-day on Saturday afternoon a discussion and debate will be held, led by Bill Schwarz, Lynne Segal, and Nick Beech, on the role history plays in public and political discourse, and how historical reason might contribute to a radical politics.

Radical Historical Practice Beyond the Academy

An important question motivating this strand of the conference is how radical history can operate beyond the academic institution. We are excited that a number of different research groups, reflecting a range of constituencies, have responded to our call in this regard. On Saturday afternoon, the People’s Histreh Notts Radical History Group will be providing a workshop ‘Loveable Luddites and Righteous Rioters – Can we be radical historians without pissing people off?’

In this workshop, participants will not only consider the deradicalisation of the past within meleorist, institutional histories, raising the question as to whether the past is pacified, but will also consider the structural conditions in which history is reproduced—the systems of funding, control of public forums, and instrumentalisation of history toward economic or political ends: People’s Histreh ask ‘how can groups and individuals engage in radical history? What is radical about radical history? The stories we investigate? The ways in which we tell them? The reasons why we tell them?’

Radical Histories conference

On Friday morning, a number of DIY arts and cultural practitioners connected with the Limehouse Town Hall, hold a workshop examining the economic, political and ethical questions that have been raised in the project to institute a new civic space in Limehouse. As Elyssa Livergant, convener and facilitator of the workshop state: ‘[Limehouse Town Hall] a former nineteenth civic building is now occupied by a range of creative residents – arts, cultural and community producers with studios who also run varied progressive and ‘radical’ cultural and educational activities for wider communities in Limehouse, East London and beyond. [It] has been user led since 2004 under the umbrella of the charity Limehouse Town Hall Consortium Trust.

The Trust holds a lease for the building from Tower Hamlets Council. Drawing on the heritage of the Town Hall as a civic centre and one time labour history museum, we seek to draw a contemporary parallel for the buildings present use. With the input of current creative residents, Trust members and you this workshop will explore the relationship between the more recent civic history of the building and the role of the arts and culture in contemporary civic life.’

Finally, we also have a workshop, convened by Ian Gwinn, that brings together a number of representatives, from ‘Free Universities’ and other student education activists, from across the UK. Since 2010, the cuts to education funding and trebling of tuition fees have lent new urgency and impetus to the struggle to develop radical and critical alternatives to orthodox educational models. New initiatives have sprung up, advancing a very different vision of the organisation and practice of education. The idea that the purpose of education should be for emancipation and liberation, that it should be run along democratic lines, and that it should equip people with ‘really useful knowledge’, connects these initiatives to a long and rich heritage, from Owenite and Chartist ventures in the 19th Century through to second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s.

In this session we will explore the kinds of principles, forms and purposes that inform current practice with contributions from members of these initiatives and others. Here a host of issues arise, carrying both practical and theoretical implications for how we go about assessing the prospects for radical and critical education today. These include the structure of pedagogical encounters (curricula, assessment, space), the resources (institutional, material, personal) upon which they depend and how they are secured and enlarged, and the process of contesting dominant conceptions of pedagogy.

There are many other sessions throughout the course of the three days of Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism that we hope will contribute to a searching investigation on the active, educative, and ethical dimensions of ‘radicalism’ in historical practice and dissemination.

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The EU Referendum: Will It Be In Or Out?

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This post was contributed by Dr Ben Worthy of Birkbeck’s Department of Politics. It was originally posted on the 10 Gower Street blog on 9 June 2016.

On 8^th June Birkbeck Politics staff discussed the UK’s EU referendum, looking at what has happened so far and what may yet take place on the 23^rd June.

The panel began by looking into why the UK was having a referendum, discussing the many hidden and not to hidden factors behind it. These stretched from Cameron’s gamble, that a referendum would cure the short term threat of UKIP and unhappiness in the Conservative party, to the long term distrust towards the European Union project in the UK, harking all the way back to Britain’s campaign of attempted sabotage of the project in the 1950s and reluctant joining in the 1970s.

Reflecting on the campaign so far, the panel spoke of how referenda are, by their nature, proxies for all sorts of other subjects. The EU referendum is actually about immigration, democracy and sovereignty. Despite their popular appeal, they can also be anti-democratic in focusing so narrowly on a single decision, and pursuing a seemingly simple answer to what are complicated issues.

There was also concern at the low level of debate and failure, on both sides, to engage with facts or global realities, from international trade to the modern mass movement of people (see the Treasury Committee report here that similarly complained of the ‘inconsistent, unqualified and, in some cases, misleading claims and counter-claims’ made by both sides).

The panel also reflected on how different views of the EU split different parts of England and the United Kingdom-creating what has been called a Disunited Kingdom of intentions and support. What would happen if Scotland and Northern Ireland voted Remain but England and Wales wished to leave? It could all get complicated and this paper speaks of some of the profound constitutional consequences. But do referenda’s ever solve an issue (think Scotland in 2014)? The panel thought it is unlikely to be the last EU referendum the UK has.

In terms of the voting itself, the polls so far show a knife edge result, resting on the margin of error. To find out what our panel think will happen on the 23^rd June (and why José Mourinho’s views could prove decisive) listen to the podcast below.

https://soundcloud.com/british-politics-centre/the-eu-referendum-will-it-be-in-or-out

Find Out More

For polling data and analyses see John Curtice’s What UK Thinks website and Matt Singh’s Number Cruncher Politics
The betting odds are here (it looks roughly 77% remain vs. 25-28% Leave)
The House of Commons Library impartial background research on the referendum, Brexit and issues it raises here
On the panel were: Rosie Campbell‎; Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos‎; Dermot Hodson‎; Deborah Mabbett‎; Jason Edwards
Courses in the Department of Politics

Lux Imperium: Moving Images of the British Empire

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This post was contributed by Noah Angell, co-director of the upcoming film Lux Imperium. A work in progress of the film will be introduced at the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) Amateur Cinema Night on Saturday 18 June. Book your free place here.

Lux Imperium is a new film and research project by Noah Angell and Francis Gooding. This afternoon session will introduce the project, before expanding its scope to look at amateur film in relation to cinema and examine some contemporary vernacular films drawn from online sources.

The home movie camera first became available to the public in the same decades that saw the unraveling of the British Empire. While using this technology to record their private lives, amateur filmmakers throughout the British colonies were also unwittingly capturing the biggest empire in history in free fall. Composed from hundreds of home movies and privately edited amateur films made during the dissolution of the British Empire, Lux Imperium reanimates these documents of late colonial vision and imperial collapse, showing the last days of the Empire from an intimate and wholly unseen perspective.

The ubiquity of privately-made moving images in the era of smart phones, Youtube, and mobile broadband makes the history of vernacular film a pressing contemporary issue that this work will imaginatively and critically explore.

For the session held at BIMI on the 18^th of June, Francis Gooding will give his paper, ‘The Visual Vernacular: 6 note on amateur film’, which provides a formal framework for distinguishing amateur film as a cinematic language that is distinct from other modes of cinematic production.

This will be followed by a screening and discussion of in-progress edits of Lux Imperium and its source reels – private films from the colonies, recording the British colonial classes’ vision of events and daily minutiae, with subject matter ranging from anti-Imperial uprisings to colonial gardening.

To conclude the session, Angell and Gooding will speak about contemporary amateur film, showcasing and analyzing vernacular film practice taken from Youtube, Vine and Instagram. Moving images are now an everyday mode of processing and preserving experience, and homemade films are now a critical tool in the constitution and cohesion of online communities who are geographically dispersed or otherwise isolated. Online spaces which traffic in moving images are frequently used to publicly document, present and define both political events and the private self, and also as a space of play.

Lux Imperium is based on material uncovered and first digitized as part of the BFI-hosted Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire project (www.colonialfilm.org.uk). By recognizing the importance of home movies within the visual history of colonialism, Lux Imperium will further develop the ideas and research of the original Colonial Film project.

A work in progress of Lux Imperium will be hosted by BIMI at the Birkbeck Cinema (43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD) on Saturday 18 June 2016 at 2pm. Book your free place here.

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Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI)