Paper 1: Testimony of Flight

Jane Spiro

This exhibition tells the story of flight drawing on transcribed interviews with two travellers in their own words, Julek and Ludwig who escaped Cracow on foot in 1939 days before Nazi occupation; my own words giving life to ancestors and family members who escaped anti-semitic pogroms in the small wooden villages of the Urals by travelling east into Siberia; and images from my own travels in 2018 through the landscape they traversed between Cracow and Vladivostock. The aim is to take you too on a journey and to trigger your stories on the way: reminders of what constitutes home, what constitutes flight, what memory brings to the surface and what it suppresses or distorts

Paper 2: Creative pedagogies / international education

Gail Gauron and colleagues at the RETOPEA project

UNAVAILABLE

Paper 3: Peaceful Youth: Memories of British Peace Movement Activism, 1920s-1960s

Susannah Wright

From the 1920s to the 1960s, peace movement campaigners in Britain campaigned for a societal transformation which would enable individuals to be peaceful and avoid war, and emphasised the significance of children and young people in securing this desired future. Yet research into relevant 'primary' peace movements (cf Ceadel)¹ - the League of Nations Union, the Peace Pledge Union, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament - has to date devoted limited attention to the place and significance of childhood and youth, and of relationships between adults and young people, within these movements. This paper will examine (1) the influences and relationships in childhood and youth which drew campaigners towards activism within British peace movements; and (2) what these campaigners thought, and did, as adults about promoting their cause among children and young people. It will draw on the narratives which individual activists have offered of their participation in archived oral history interviews (in the British Library and Imperial War Museum sound archive collections), for 20 individuals born between 1900 and 1940. These activists are not the leaders of organisations nationally, but committed individuals, often active locally – their narratives are under-explored. This paper will consider what 'speaking out' of children/young people means when the voice is recorded retrospectively in interview form, and drawn on as data later still by a historian not involved in the original conversation. There are methodological challenges. Notwithstanding these, I argue (cf Gleason and Miller among others)² for the value of this analysis in shedding light on a range of agentic responses to adult influences whilst young, including cooperation, intergenerational alliances, and resistance. More ambitiously, I offer this examination of intergenerational dynamics within peace movements as a partial explanation of how these organisations are sustained, and change, over time.