All welcome to the inaugural Commonweal lecture by Professor Paul Rogers: Suggesting the Possible – responding to a world going wrong, Thursday 9 February 2012 at 6.30 pm in the John Stanley Bell Lecture Theatre, University of Bradford.  It’s free, no need to book.

Event on Facebook and on Northern Indymedia.

Commonweal Collection is an independent library covering issues of peace, nonviolence and social change. To join or find out more, email: commonweal@bradford.ac.uk.

Further praise and recognition for the Oxford International Encyclopaedia of Peace, which we’ve mentioned several times.   Professor Nigel Young has won the Award for Scholarship of the Dayton International Literary Peace Prize 2011 for his work in compiling and editing the Encyclopaedia, which was described by  Professor Robert Fogarty at the awards ceremony as “a heroic and brilliant piece of collective scholarship”.

Professor Young played a key role in the development of the University of Bradford’s Peace Studies department, and has strong links with Commonweal.   The Encyclopaedia includes entries by various University staff and former staff and Commonweal contacts.  It is very exciting that this major award recognises Professor Young’s efforts and the high quality of the work itself.

University of Bradford press release about the story

See our copy!  Encyclopaedia on the Library catalogue

 

 

 

Bits of news about peace-related activities in Bradford in 2012:

The Peace Museum has a new mini-exhibition, Playing for Peace, which looks at friendship, cohesion, peacebuilding, anti-bullying, diversity, equality and the Olympic and Paralympic Values.   It’s ideal for school or other educational use.  Find out more on the exhibition’s blog.

The 2012 University of Bradford Peace Jam will take place 27-29 April and feature Nobel peace laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel.  Link to follow …

 

I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned from the PaxCat experience at a conference later this month.

My talk, PaxCat Tales: the pleasures and pitfalls of bringing peace archives to life, is part of Beyond the Fringe on 29 November at the Bishopgate Institute.   Organised by the British Records Association, the event looks at the issues involved in collecting pressure group archives.  These are incredibly rewarding, rich collections for researchers and communities (as this blog I hope shows).  But collecting and managing them can be difficult.  I’m really looking forward to hearing the other speakers, who’ll be discussing lesbian and gay history, political archives, and zines, among other things.  I’ll put my presentation online in due course.

Some exciting bits of news from our friends at the Peace Museum, which is also based in Bradford.

They will have access to great new spaces to work with young people, at the city’s new youth centre, Culture Fusion, located in a former mill on Thornton Road.  Culture Fusion opens officially tomorrow (Saturday 29 October).  The new spaces include a “peace pod” and classroom.  We wish both the Museum and Culture Fusion all the best and hope to work with both in future.

Playing for Peace is an awardwinning exhibition about the role of sport in bringing communities together, created by the Museum and Coventry University’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies (CPRS) and available for loan by schools and other non-profit groups.   It was launched in Coventry Cathedral a couple of weeks ago and of course fits in with the work of the Olympics and Paralympics in London 2012.

You can keep up with Peace Museum news via their newish twitter account.

 

 

The Commonweal Archives in Special Collections at the University of Bradford are dominated by the campaigns from 1950s onwards influenced by Gandhi’s ideas of non violent direct action.  Sometimes to enquirers’ surprise, we have relatively little on, say, earlier anti-war protests or conscientious objectors in the two world wars.  This is because our peace archives come via our links with Commonweal Library, which itself originated in these 1950s movements, and because other archives have stronger collections of earlier material.   However, our archive collections do include some intriguing pre-1950 material on these matters …

Which is a roundabout way of introducing the latest in our 100 Objects exhibition which should interest readers of this blog.  In “Object 30, A Great Stay and Strength“, I examine the inscriptions by Arthur Raistrick on Quaker books he read while imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the First World War.  They offer an interesting way to explore his life, beliefs and scholarly writings of Dr Raistrick, who was recently named the “Dalesman of the Millennium”.

J.B. Priestley and Jacquetta Hawkes in 1958

The latest in the 100 Objects exhibition from Special Collections sheds more light on nuclear disarmament campaigning in Britain during the 1950s.  The article (and accompanying video on youtube) uses the Archives of J.B. Priestley and his wife, the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, to tell the story of the couple’s involvement in the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1958.  Priestley wrote an important article, Jacquetta brought women together to campaign.  Both believed in traditional parliamentary methods rather than using the mass civil disobedience of the Committee of 100, and gave up their active role in CND as a result of leadership splits over this issue.  Jacquetta remained sympathetic to unilateral nuclear disarmament well into the 1970s.

Many of the stories in Special Collections 100 Objects series concern peace studies and activism at the University. Here’s a couple we added recently that Paxcat followers might enjoy:

Object 15: A Library for Peace surveys the history of Commonweal, the independent library based at the University which promotes nonviolence.  Find out more about David Hoggett, its remarkable founder, and how the ideas of Gandhi underlie the library to this day.  The archives catalogued by PaxCat Project were originally collected by Commonweal.

Object 20: A Concern for Peace is the story of peace education at the University itself: how the Quaker Peace Studies Trust raised funds to support a Chair in peace studies.

Though both stories are told from a historical perspective based on evidence in the archives, it is good to add that both Commonweal and the Quaker Peace Studies Trust continue to thrive and to form part of the network of peace activity around the University.

Sad news has reached us of the death of Devi Prasad earlier this month.  Born in 1921, he worked with Gandhi at the ashram Sevagram and was instrumental in the spread and development of  Gandhi’s ideas of nonviolence.   He was a Trustee of Commonweal Library (1963-1982) and worked for many years with War Resisters International (here is their obituary of him, which explains his roles over the years).  As well as his work for peace, Devi Prasad was an artist and potter.  He published many books on peace education, conscription, Gandhi’s ideas, and the history of WRI itself.

A collection of his papers is held by the IISG.  His close links with the ideas and other people involved with Commonweal mean that the archives at Bradford also contain many traces of his work including his letters to Barbara Bruce (also at Sevagram).  I’ll link to more obituaries and information as they come our way.

I created a new page to bring together all the reflective posts written by Helen Roberts during her time as Project Archivist.  For various tech reasons, it isn’t easy to gather them together any more and I was a little concerned that Helen’s wonderful insights into the stories behind the Commonweal Archives would be hidden beneath the many pieces of news shared since. Just a list at the moment, but I will be enriching it soon.  Creating the page reminded me how interesting the posts were and how many subjects and parts of the world are represented in the archives.  I hope you enjoy them.