Saturday, July 23, 2011

Activists From ’68 Revolutions Interviewed For Database

Hundreds of interviews with former activists from the 1968 revolutions which shook Europe have been analysed and put online by an international research team led by historians at Oxford University.

Nearly 500 activists from more than 100 activist networks in 14 European countries have been recorded discussing how they became involved in activism, their experiences in 1968 and what they now think about their activist past.

The interviews have been put into an online database called ‘Around 1968’: Activism, Networks, Trajectories’, which has now been launched at Oxford University, thanks to funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.

Professor Robert Gildea of Oxford University’s Faculty of History, who led the project and interviewed over 60 French activists, said: ‘Around 1968 investigates former activists’ reflections on the revolution 40 years on, looking into their motivations; how their views have changed with age; their backgrounds, networks and interactions with others; and how political and cultural revolutions overlapped in 1968.

‘Now is the perfect time to conduct these interviews – former activists are able to reflect back and make sense of their experiences 40 years on while the recent wave of protests has brought notions of revolt and revolution to the forefront of people’s minds – today’s is the first generation of radical students since the 1970s.

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