Reframing Resistance: Strategies for change past, present & future

We live in a time of genocide, climate change, the rise of the far right, growing inequality, and the scapegoating of marginalised people in the name of "safety". The time to resist is now: But it is also the time to strategise and plan.

Our three panellists will bring their lived experience and their research to discuss “what works?”

When we advocate for change, when we work together or alone, when we have to keep fighting when we are tired, how do we build coalition and how do we make a brighter tomorrow possible?

Drawing on work across disability rights, climate and racial justice as well as state and police accountability our 3 speakers offer insight and action from rich and varied perspectives.

– Our Speakers –

Rachel Charlton-Dailey (she/ they) is an award-winning disabled journalist, activist and author. A columnist at The Canary, she has previously reported for the BBC, The Unwritten, The Big Issue, Metro, The Guardian and the Daily Mirror. When Rachel isn’t writing, they can be found walking their sausage dog, Rusty.

Sam Gonçalves is a Brazilian writer and documentary filmmaker, based in Glasgow. His work has appeared in The National, Counterpoint, and The Skinny and he publishes bi-monthly interviews on Everything Mixtape.

Janet Alder is a British campaigner, who has fought for justice and against police brutality since her brother’s death in 1998. She has written for the Newstatesman, and her fight has been reported on by the BBC, the Socialist Worker and the Guardian, among others.

– The Books –

Ramping up Rights by Rachel Charlton-Dailey

From the ‘crippled suffragette’, to ’80s punks chaining themselves to buses, to campaigners taking a stand online, this book celebrates the amazing activists and protest actions behind the UK’s long battle for disabled people’s rights to live.

Rachel Charlton-Dailey highlights a shockingly overlooked tradition of disabled struggle. She unpacks how British attitudes and policy went so wrong in the twenty-first century, and interviews campaigners and disabled people about how they have reclaimed power, from resisting government reforms to changing the media narrative. She explores live frontiers in the push for civil rights—from the scandalous inaccessibility of our education and transport systems, to the existential debates about genetic screening and ‘the right to die’.

In this powerful book, honouring past disability activism becomes a call to action. Charlton-Dailey shows readers how hard, and how often, disabled people and their allies have fought, and won. She gives them the energy to keep fighting back.

How Does Change Happen? - Sam Gonçalves

Mass protests and direct action have been familiar tactics against the many crises of the 21st century. Though methods vary, there’s a collective longing for meaningful and transformative action. Some are deemed too weak, others too disruptive: from Instagram tiles to cans of soup thrown on famous paintings.

Through conversations with activists and organisers, Sam Gonçalves recounts stories of protest and the fight for change, from a community of landless workers in Southern Brazil, to chefs unionising their workplace in Glasgow, Scotland. These narratives reveal the opportunities and challenges that are part of the difficult work of creating change, a wrestling with the question: how does change happen?

Having a ‘positive impact’ in the world is often relegated to the ‘personal’, an individual endeavour. Gonçalves investigates that assumption and explores ways communities have resisted collectively, and fought against the individualising forces surrounding them.

Defiance by Janet Adler and Dan Glazebrook

‘This is a story – among many others – of justice denied. Fighting this battle over the past quarter of a century has been a lesson in collusion, cover-up and all the sophisticated – as well as the crude – methods employed by different parts of the British state to maintain the status quo, protect itself and those in its employ and evade justice . . . This book is my attempt to bring some kind of accountability, simply by telling the truth.‘

The police killing of Christopher Alder was one of the most notorious deaths in custody in the UK, involving the destruction of evidence, a whitewash of an investigation and illegal surveillance.

Christopher’s sister Janet has been relentlessly fighting for justice for decades, and fearlessly holds the UK’s state institutions to account in this extraordinary book.

This book is a probing expose of what went on, based on exhaustive documentary evidence, as well as the personal story of Janet’s fight to uncover the truth.