TY - JOUR
T1 - Solidarity on the Move
T2 - Imaginaries and Infrastructures within The People’s March for Jobs (1981)
AU - Griffin, Paul
N1 - Funding information: This research was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (SRG1920\101292). I would also like to thank the oral history participants listed above, as well the archives used. Before submission, the paper received extremely helpful feedback from my colleagues Dr John Clayton and Dr Sarah Hughes—thank you for such supportive comments. I would also like to acknowledge the Transactions editorial team, Dr Sam Halvorsen and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive feedback.
PY - 2023/9/11
Y1 - 2023/9/11
N2 - This paper revisits the 1981 People's March for Jobs as a moment of unemployed activism and solidarity in the UK. The paper argues that the march revealed a spatial politics of solidarity as characterised through mobility, presence, imaginaries and dialogue. It considers how the march emerged through trade union organising and forged political alliances in articulating opposition against rising unemployment, challenging the associated stigma around labour market inactivity. Contributing to geographical scholarship on ‘working-class presence’ and concepts of ‘imagined solidarity’, the paper explores the ‘solidarity infrastructures’ that enabled unemployed resistance. It considers material resources alongside a more generative and imaginary understanding of solidarity as fostered through the march. These more transitory and temporary forms of solidarity are meaningful in their immediacy, but also hold longer lasting impacts on both those involved and the places visited. In this regard, the combination of ‘imagined solidarities’ and ‘solidarity infrastructures’ provides geographers with an insight into the spatial dynamics of marching as resistance, as well as reflecting a wider resonance with trade union sensibilities.
AB - This paper revisits the 1981 People's March for Jobs as a moment of unemployed activism and solidarity in the UK. The paper argues that the march revealed a spatial politics of solidarity as characterised through mobility, presence, imaginaries and dialogue. It considers how the march emerged through trade union organising and forged political alliances in articulating opposition against rising unemployment, challenging the associated stigma around labour market inactivity. Contributing to geographical scholarship on ‘working-class presence’ and concepts of ‘imagined solidarity’, the paper explores the ‘solidarity infrastructures’ that enabled unemployed resistance. It considers material resources alongside a more generative and imaginary understanding of solidarity as fostered through the march. These more transitory and temporary forms of solidarity are meaningful in their immediacy, but also hold longer lasting impacts on both those involved and the places visited. In this regard, the combination of ‘imagined solidarities’ and ‘solidarity infrastructures’ provides geographers with an insight into the spatial dynamics of marching as resistance, as well as reflecting a wider resonance with trade union sensibilities.
U2 - 10.1111/tran.12637
DO - 10.1111/tran.12637
M3 - Article
SP - 1
EP - 18
JO - Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
JF - Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
SN - 0020-2754
ER -
