Remembering Resistance: Memories of Manchester Protests

Were you at the rally in Manchester on 20 February 1988 to fight for LGBT+ rights against Section 28? How about the political demonstration on 8 March 2003 to object the Iraq War? Or the protest on 31 January 2017 to oppose Donald Trump’s immigration executive order?

Can you remember where these protest routes started and ended? If you participated, did you bring anything with you to show your support? What emotions were you feeling on the day? Do you have a favourite memory?

If you can answer any of these questions, and if you have experiences of these and other protests in Manchester over the past 50 years, we’d like to hear from you!

This one-day event is part of Remembering Resistance, which is a wider research project from Lancaster University. It’s an opportunity to bring together people who were involved in protests in Manchester over the past 50 years to share and document their diverse stories. We’re interested in protestors, the police, the media, bystanders and anyone else who has something to say.

We have:

• A huge map of Manchester for you to draw and document the protests you’ve been on;
• A massive timeline showing all the protests in Manchester over the past 50 years that you can add your information and experiences to;
• A memories booth where you can record your recollections of past and current protests in Manchester;
• A photography area where we can take pictures of any objects that you have from protests and create an online archive;
• A sharing circle where you can talk and tell stories about your experiences of protests with other people.

Due to the limited number of sharing circles we can have on the day, could you please let us know if you’d like to take part by emailing rememberingresistance@gmail.com. If you’re not able to join us for a sharing circle, we would still love it if you mapped, timelined, made memories and had your object’s picture taken with us!

This event is part of our Never Going Underground season, a year long programme of exhibitions, events and learning programmes exploring the past, present and future of LGBT+ activism.

The event is funded by Lancaster University and involves a research team within both Politics and Design from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

All images licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Licence: Image 1, © Copyright Stuart Grout; Image 2, © Man Alive!; Image 3, © Copyright Keith Williamson; Image 4, © Peter Damian. Image 5 is licensed for reuse by Pathe UK.