The 11th annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist studies is only a few weeks away, and we are happy to announce an exciting extra event at this years conference:
At the end of the first day we will have a special plenary session with the research collective Freedom of Movements.
Freedom of movements is a collective doing activist research in Copenhagen – working with and learning from local movements and struggles. The collective was formed in 2015 as an effort to contribute to the migration struggles that were spreading across Denmark’s asylum and deportation camps in those years. In the last two years they have researched the political repression of the movement for the liberation of Palestine in Denmark.
At the plenary session, representatives from Freedom of Movements will present a talk and lead a discussion of the wider implication for research engaged in contemporary social conflicts on the basis of the work they have carried out to document the represion of Palestine solidarity in Denmark.
We look forward to welcoming Freedom of Movements at the conference and to an engaging and productive exchange at this special plenary event!
The session will take place at 5-6pm on Friday 3 October.
Research as a Site of Struggle and Freedom: Political Grammars of Liberation
What kind of political thinking about freedom is required to respond to the challenges of our present moment? What forms of knowledge production can support, complement and advance struggles for the liberation of Palestine and against state repression? This and similar questions have animated our work at the Freedom of Movements research collective.
Over the last years, we have worked on documenting the repression of the movement for the liberation of Palestine in Denmark, collecting testimonies of people who have faced political repression at the hands of the police, the media, employers, politicians and state institutions. The pro-Palestine movement is a paradigmatic case in the sense that it reveals the contours of the Danish state’s repressive apparatus: how it criminalizes dissent, how it uses anti-terror laws and anti-antisemitism policies to silence Palestine solidarity, and how it deploys the full weight of institutional power – from the police to the university – to enforce political conformity and pacify the struggle.
In this plenary, we reflect on the meaning of writing collectively while being engaged politically with the struggles and the people we study and document, working with them and alongside them. We challenge the notion that knowledge production is an individual and detached academic exercise that can only happen within ‘academia’. We argue for forms of research that are collective and refuse neutrality, complicity and colonial ‘objectivity’. Research that is politically engaged and explicit (both in theory and in practice) of its commitments; and that take place outside academia, using militant spaces and other activist infrastructure. Knowledge production can and must be mobilized as a weapon in the struggle.
Danish Society for Marxist Studies 