School of Geography - Faculty of Environment

Before I started the MA I was involved with Friends of the Earth, but didn’t have a strong activist background unlike some of the others on this course.  For my day job I worked as a software engineer on climate models. This is one of the reasons why I decided upon this MA, as through my work I came to fully realise the threat we face from climate change.  When I spotted this course it looked like a great opportunity to reflect on the challenges we face and how we might go about solving them.  The MA has really helped broaden my knowledge, both in terms of campaigning strategies and tactics, and in terms of theory: a great chance to learn about different schools of thought that I was only vaguely aware of before, for example: Marx, Gramsci, feminism and anarchism.  I’ll illustrate with a couple of recent examples.

Firstly, through the theoretical grounding of the course I gained an understanding of carbon trading, which I’ve put to good use through talks at Friends of the Earth’s Northern Gathering and Climate Chaos Café at the Common Place, a local social centre. I’m also using this knowledge and contacts gained through the course more strategically by preparing a motion on carbon trading for Friends of the Earth’s Annual Conference (aimed at strengthening their position for the December 2009 UN Copenhagen Conference).

Secondly, the practical campaigning know-how I’ve picked up through the course has helped me facilitate meetings and film evenings for my local Transition Town group (TINWOLF – Transition Inner North West Of Leeds Forum), and I’ve come to realise the importance of good campaign planning.  Indeed, I’ve directly used parts of the campaign plan we created for our Campaigning for Social Change group project at a recent TINWOLF talk, and film evening.

Before I arrived on this MA I had spent several years as a full time activists working on a variety of campaigns. At university I started mobilising against the G8’s arrival in the UK and a smaller meeting in Sheffield where I lived. The convergence space we squatted in town led to the development of a community social centre. The group I cycled to the G8 in Scotland with became the radical anarcho-cycling collective Bicycology. Our first cycling tour finished at the first Climate Camp at Drax in 2006. At this Camp I was introduced to a small direct action group focusing on the growing climate impact of the aviation industry, called Plane Stupid. I went on to be involved with this group for a period of few years including working full time on developing and supporting its growing network of groups. I was still working with Plane Stupid and the Climate Camp when I began the MA.

Some people asked me why I bothered to do the MA in Activism and Social Change when I was already so engaged. One answer to this is that at times I found the intensity of campaigning so involving that there was rarely much chance to step back and reflect on what we were doing. We tried to make time for this but inevitably the pressure of dealing with the media, organising meetings and mobilising for events and actions took up most of my time. Studying the MA gave me time to reflect on what we were doing and how we could do it better. Studying the MA gave me time and resources which would expose me to critical ideas, and histories related to activism and social change. Having to contribute to discussions and write essays provided me with an incentive to read the texts that I would otherwise have quickly put down. Furthermore the wide range of guest speakers and the dynamic mix of ideas enabled me to develop new philosophical tools for activism, histories of different radical thinking and action, and a number of analyses that enabled me to link things together and see the proverbial ‘wood beyond the trees’.

The focus on activism has given a broad interdisciplinary area of study a firm anchor point to return to when discussing philosophical critiques or historical examples of resistance. Often in discussion we could always ask; ‘how is this useful to activism?’ The action research dissertation is a good example of this and the courses attempt to create more and better activism. In order to carry out our dissertation we must actively get involved with a group and help them carry out some campaign task and then critically evaluate how we did it. This could also be true of the other pieces of work. So if I needed to get to grips with a particular issue such as carbon trading in order to be able to help strategise how the Climate Camp should use its energies I could write an essay about the political impacts of carbon trading. In this sense the course has helped create more and better activism as the resources of the academy have been mobilised to the benefit of various social movements.

In my opinion the MA should attempt to tackle a number of challenges. It should attempt to bring more activism into the academy by directly studying the academy as a major social institution and by seeking to engage students in the politics of that institution. Secondly, the MA must work to take itself outside the academy by organising activities or forms of activity that can be utilised by all campaigners not just the ones privileged enough to afford the luxury of joining the course. In so doing the MA could help contribute to a culture of reflexive activism, that is critical and strategic thinking amongst radical social movements.