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Street Protest and Social Movements in the Modern Era

Module description

This module focuses on the sources available for the study of street protest and social movements. It concentrates on protest and movements in Great Britain and the United States, but you will also research protest events in other countries and study themes such as leadership, policing or memory. The module deals mainly with unemployed, civil rights, feminist and peace movements, and is interdisciplinary in scope. You will look at a wide range of sources and methodological approaches and will be given the opportunity to study a protest event of their choice from the modern era.

Module aims - intentions of the module

This module helps you to get an interdisciplinary perspective on the history, meaning and impact of street protest in Great Britain, the United States and other countries. It trains you how to interpret and contextualise a wide variety of different and often unfamiliar sources, such images, film and music, parliamentary debates, government files, police records, ego-documents, newspaper articles and novels. It also helps you to improve your presentation skills by asking you to do a variety of group presentations as well as one single assessed presentation.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Have a detailed knowledge of the different sources available for the study of street protest and social movements, together with a very close specialist knowledge of those sources which the students focus upon in their seminar presentations and written work
• 2. Analyse the complex diversity of the sources studied

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Analyse closely original sources and to assess their reliability as historical evidence and to focus on and comprehend complex texts
• 4. Understand and deploy relevant historical terminology in a comprehensible manner
• 5. Follow street protest across the period

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 6. Independently and autonomously study and also work within a group, including presentation of material for group discussion, developed through the mode of learning
• 7. Digest, select and organise material to produce, to a deadline, a coherent and cogent argument, developed through the mode of assessment
• 8. Present complex arguments orally

Syllabus plan

The module focuses on primary sources dealing with street protest in the context of social movements in Great Britain, the United States and other countries. Whilst the content may vary from year to year, among the protests it deals with are, for example:

• The demonstrations of the unemployed in Britain during the 1880s
• May Day demonstrations in a global context
• Coxey’s Army
• Suffrage parades in Britain and America
• The protest of the unemployed in Britain and America between the World Wars
• The 1930 Salt March in India
• The TUC Hyde Park demonstration in 1933
• The Battle of Cable Street
• The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
• The Civil Rights Movement in the United States
• The protest against the war in Vietnam
• The People’s Marches for Jobs in the 1980s
• The protest in Northern Ireland, the Million Man March of 1995
• Protest events organised by the Global Justice Movement

In addition it will address themes such as leadership, music, policing, memory or the impact of the media, and you will be asked to research a protest event of their choice.

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

The re-assessment consists of a 4,000 word portfolio of source work, as in the original assessment, but replaces the individual presentation with a written script that could be delivered in such a presentation and which is the equivalent of 20 minutes of speech.

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• Cohen, Max, I was One of the Unemployed (London, 1945).
• Frow, Edmund, and Ruth Frow, The Battle of Bexley Square: Salford Unemployed Workers’ Demonstration – 1^st October, 1931(Salford, 1994).
• Hannington, Wal, Unemployed Struggles 1919-1936: My Life and Struggles amongst the Unemployed (London, 1977).
• Lynskey, Dorian, 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (London, 2010).
• MacDougall, Ian (ed.), Voices from the Hunger Marches: Personal Recollections by Scottish Hunger Marchers of the 1920s and 1930s, Vol. I (Edinburgh, 1990).
• Madhubuti, Haki R. and Maulana Karenga (eds.), Million Man March/Day of Absence: A Commemorative Anthology (Chicago, 1996).
• Mailer, Norman, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1^st publ. 1968; New York, 1994).
• Minnion, John and Philip Bolsover (eds.), The CND Story: The first 25Years of CND in the Words of the People involved(London, 1983)
• Wilkinson, Ellen, The Town that was Murdered: The Life Story of Jarrow (London, 1939).
• Various films such as: Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz at al, March to Aldermaston, Docu-Drama, UK 1959, Black and White, 33mins.

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE – https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1199
• “A Guid Cause… The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland – their Struggles for Change within Society,” http://suffragettes.nls.uk/sources
• “BBC Archive: Bloody Sunday,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/bloody_sunday
• “Greenham Common: The Women’s Peace Camp 1981-2000,” http://archive.iwm.org.uk/upload/package/22/greenham/index.htm

Key words search

Protest, Social Movements, Suffrage, Civil Rights, Feminism, Peace Movement, Unemployment, Modern Britain, United States, Policing, Memory, Leadership