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Global '68: Solidarity in Alliance and Global History

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Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

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'Global '68' is a linked set of two conferences, organized by Françoise VergeÌ€s, Marcus Rediker, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, and Sylvie Robic, sponsored by the ColleÌ€ge d'études mondiales, the University of Pittsburgh, Birkbeck/University of London, and the University of Nanterre, to be held in Paris May 2-4 and London May 5-6, 2018.

Both events will focus on the movements and major shifts in politico-cultural sensibilities around the world that made 1968 such an extraordinary year. Three notions are central to our approach: solidarity in alliances, global history, and history from below.

1968 was a year of offensives, uprisings, and demonstrations against capitalism and imperialism, for liberation and emancipation and the war in Vietnam was its epicenter. The events claimed many victories for democracy, equality, and emancipation, but also provoked deep, abiding repression. A counterfeit history has subsequently erased police violence and the deaths of participants, removed workers, women, students, and indigenous peoples from the picture, and eliminated anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, as well as the profound influences of the wars and interventions in Algeria, Latin America, and Vietnam. 'Global 68' will retrieve the aspirations, energies, memories, and histories of this worldwide movement and offer hope to a new generation of activists.

A full programme of the events in Paris and London can be found here.

Speakers at the Birkbeck event:

Enrique Dussel Ambrosini is an Argentine and Mexican academic, philosopher, historian, and theologian. Known world-wide as one of the founders of the Liberation Philosophy & Theology movement and a most accomplished thinker and political activist. He served as the interim rector of the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México from 2013 to 2014. He's currently at work on a Politics and Aesthetics of Liberation.

Lewis R. Gordon is Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the author of many books, the co-founder, organizer, and member of a variety of worldwide academic, political, and artistic associations, journals, and publishing projects.

Sylvia Federici is a long time feminist activist, teacher and writer. In 1972 she helped to found the International Feminist Collective, which in turn launched the Campaign for Wages For Housework. In 1991 she was one of the founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. She is the author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004), recently published in France as Caliban et la sorcière (2017).

Ronald Judy is Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and a member of the boundary 2 Editorial Collective. A Fulbright Fellow at the Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes from 1998-99, he has edited two important boundary 2 dossiers on Tunisia: Some Notes on the Status of Global English in Tunisia (2000), and The Tunisian Revolution Dignity (2012).

Peter Linebaugh is an historian or people's remembrancer living in the region of the Great Lakes of North America. His first book is just published in French, Les Pendus de Londres (Lux & CMDE). His forthcoming book is about the fulcrum to our age, 'Red Round Globe Hot Burning.'

Vijay Prashad is the Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Chief Editor, LeftWord Books. His most recent book is Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord Books, 2017).

Kristin Ross (NYU) is the author of May '68 and its Afterlives (2002), and, most recently, of Communal Luxury (2015). She has just translated and introduced a book written by the Mauvaise Troupe, a group of militant occupiers in the Notre-Dame-des-Landes struggle: The Zad and No Tav (Verso 2017).

Robyn C. Spencer is a historian that researches Black radicalism, gender and social protest. She has written widely about the Black Power movement and is the author of The Revolution has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (2016).

Françoise Vergès (co-organizer of Global '68) is Chair of the Global South(s), Maison des sciences de l'homme, Paris. Her last book which is translated for Duke University Press addresses race, the state politics of reproduction, and Black women's wombs.

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