Toward a global history of civil disobedience Seminar

Time:: 16:30 - 18:00
Date:: 2 March 2022
Venue:: Online (Microsoft Teams)

Event details

You are warmly invited to a research event that brings a guest speaker into conversation with two members of the Department of History. Our visiting speaker is the global historian Eraldo Souza dos Santos, whose paper on the history of civil disobedience will be followed by brief responses from Priti Mishra and Chris Fuller, and general discussion.

Description of event:

Over the past half-century, civil disobedience has become a key political concept in the United States. The meaning of the phrase, however, has been contested on more than one occasion—from discussions on the radicalism of the political aims of Occupy Wall Street and the Movement for Black Lives to controversy over the legitimacy of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing and recent debates about the use of the concept by far-right movements. But what is civil disobedience? What does it mean? In my talk, I will offer an overview of the historical development of the phrase from its use in abolitionist circles in the mid-nineteenth century to its circulation in the British Empire and its eventual appropriation by activists, lawyers, and scholars in the 1960s and 1970s.

Speaker information

Eraldo Souza dos Santos, Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Eraldo is a doctoral student researching the intellectual history of civil disobedience. He is also a lecturer in global history at the University of Potsdam and an Erasmus+ Visiting Lecturer at the University of Southampton in March 2022.

Dr Priti Mishra, Associate Professor of History at the University of Southampton, is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern India and is especially interested in the history of language politics and literary culture in colonial India.

Dr Chris Fuller, Associate Professor in Modern and Contemporary U.S. Foreign Policy at the University of Southampton. His research explores security, insecurity, and technology since 1945, with a special focus on the 'War on Terror' and U.S. counterterrorism practices.