ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |17 pages

History’s schools

Past struggles and present realities

part I|51 pages

Engaging with activist/movement archives

chapter 1|21 pages

Working with the past

Making history of struggle part of the struggle

part II|46 pages

Learning and teaching militant histories

chapter 4|15 pages

Immediate history as personal history

The militant as a historian

chapter 6|13 pages

African history in context

Toward a praxis of radical education

part III|69 pages

Lessons from liberatory and anti-imperialist struggles

chapter 7|15 pages

Tracking the states and the UN

From an Indigenous centre

chapter 8|15 pages

The legacy of the Palestinian revolution

Reviving organising for the next generation

chapter 9|19 pages

‘An act of struggle in the present’

History, education and political campaigning by South Asian anti-imperialist activists in the UK

chapter 10|18 pages

Learning in struggle

An activist’s view of the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa

part IV|66 pages

Learning from student, youth and education struggles

chapter 11|16 pages

Alternative education

Examining past experiences critically

chapter 12|18 pages

Over the rainbow

Third World studies against the neoliberal turn

chapter 13|14 pages

Alternative imaginaries on US campuses

Revisiting the origins of Black Studies

chapter 14|16 pages

Remixing past and present struggles

Cultural activism in the Western Cape, South Africa