The History Department of Simon Fraser University is pleased to announce and call for participants for "Thinking Through Action: Twentieth-Century Social Movements and their Legacy," a conference to be held at SFU's Harbour Centre campus in Vancouver, British Columbia, June 10-11, 2005. Please join keynote speaker Bill Fletcher, Jr., from Transafrica Forum, along with plenary participants, Medea Benjamin, Michael Honey, Lee Maracle, David McNally, and Nikhil Pal Singh in this important and timely event.
The conference will bring together scholars and activists from across North America to discuss how the history of social movements in Canada and the United States can broaden our vision of today's struggles within a context of the globalization of social justice issues and the ongoing retrogressive clawback of twentieth-century social movements' policy achievements. This broadened perspective will be especially pertinent in the spring of 2005, in the months after both the Canadian and American federal elections and the new organizing challenges that will inevitably emerge.
We are organizing this conference in honor of Jack O'Dell, a social justice activist now living in Vancouver. O'Dell worked closely with Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson, and has played an important organizing role at different periods in the labor, civil rights and peace and anti-nuclear movements from the 1940s to the present. Inspired by O'Dell's experience, vision, and organizing success, the conference will focus on movements against the inseparable trio of poverty, racism, and militarism ? what Martin Luther King identified in 1967 as the most important twentieth-century struggles. Conference themes are three processes we have identified as essential to the often unprecedented successes of twentieth-century movements: "organizing change," "building internationalism," and "linking struggles."
Source: H-Net Online Announcements, 2004-09-17
