Spaces of Dissent, Protest and Transformation: Past, Present and Future

The event will take place at the the London School of Economics, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, room SAL.LG.04

Spaces of Dissent, Protest and Transformation: Past, Present and Future

According to the human rights group, Article 19, more than 5.6 billion people in the world have seen a decline in their freedom of expression over the last decade (Article 19, 2025).

In the UK, for example, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 is notable for not only strengthening the police capacities to govern physical places to protest, but also in granting police greater legal powers to restrict what they judge to be more ‘sensual’ protest tactics, such as ‘noise’ and ‘intimidation’. Pioneering surveillance mechanisms – facial recognition and digital profiling – similarly empower the authorities to not only arrest protestors in public space, but also to pre-empt activism and curtail it before it even occurs. Similar surveillance mechanisms are also at work in urban regeneration schemes.

But ordering and governing public spaces of dissent and protest have rich historical legacies in modern British and European histories. For example, the zoning of public spaces to regulate and govern protest was a common police tactic in nineteenth-century London, while the authorities adopted sensual (e.g. ‘noise’) and surveillance mechanisms of the time to monitor activists in London’s urban spaces.

Through an innovative convergence of disciplinary perspectives this symposium will explore these issues through a range of case studies from the past and the present to highlight some themes for future research on spaces of dissent, protest and transformation. Topics include:

· The changing nature of public spaces of protest in the UK from the nineteenth century until the present.

· Monuments, public landscapes and free speech.

· Social movements and protest.

· Sensual public spaces, aesthetics, and experiences.

· Socio-legal regulation of protest.

Symposium Programme

1pm: Arrival

1.10pm: Introduction

1.30pm:

Katrina Navickas

Resistance to the Ongoing Enclosure of Public Space: Protest as Practices of Commoning.

2.15-2.30pm: Break

2.30-3.30pm:

Matthew Hughes

Regulating Dissent in British Mandate Palestine, 1917-1948.

Jasbinder Nijjar

Resisting Racial Police Warfare Through Radical History.

3.30-3.45pm: Break

3.45-4.45pm

Anneleen Kenis

A Race Against the Clock? On the Paradoxes of Acting ‘Now’ in the Climate Struggle.

John Roberts

The Neoliberalisation of the Marble Arch Landscape for Free Speech.

4.45-5.00pm: Conclusions

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher Brunel University London