Past event
Saints Talk: Dr Sarah Marsden Remembering Resistance: Protest, Power and Resistance in Women's Activism
Women have fought for change for centuries: at home, in workplaces, in cities, towns and villages. Some of their stories are well known. Many are not. The role of the places and spaces where women have campaigned are also often overlooked. This is important because places matter: they can enable or constrain protest; they can represent political and people power; and they are sites where power is contested.
In this talk, Sarah will share some of the stories of women activists collected through Remembering Resistance, a programme of research, events and collaborations which examines the relationships between protest, power and place in women's activism. These stories reveal that when women mobilise, they can change what places mean, how they're experienced and how they're used, but also illustrate how places can change people – their identities, interests and commitments; and how together, over time, those processes have the potential to bring about real political and social change.
Dr Sarah Marsden is a Senior Lecturer in the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews. She joined St Andrews in 2021 after five years at the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University.
Her work looks at the process and impact of different kinds of political contention, from transnational social movements to violent militant networks, grassroots activists, and those practicing everyday forms of resistance. Her current research includes a body of work on political violence through the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats with a focus on counter-extremism, and Remembering Resistance, a programme of research that looks at the relationships between protest, power, and place to shed new light on the historical and spatial dynamics of women's activism.