Northeastern researchers Sam Kemp and Sam Waterman are set to run community workshops looking at the cultural artifacts used at demonstrations such as the anti-fascist Battle of Cable Street and the Matchgirls’ Strike.
LONDON — Whether it involved uniting against the antisemitic fascists in the 1930s or standing up for workers’ rights on the docks and in the factories in the 1800s, the East End of London has long been a hotbed for grassroots activism.
A Northeastern University research project plans to use the example of those past protests to put on community workshops in east London that encourage “critical citizenship” by examining the way demonstrations have shaped culture and history.
Sam Kemp and Sam Waterman, assistant professors on Northeastern’s London campus, will be delving into the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives to better understand the cultural artifacts that emerged out of historic campaigns.
Their research project, “The Art of Protest,” plans to use the archive’s artifacts — which range from leaflets, banners and photos to voice recordings, covering events from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1318 to the present day. These materials will form the basis of workshops with members of the community in Tower Hamlets, the borough where Northeastern’s London campus is located.
The aim is to run as many as six workshops, to digitize the archive and, depending on the level of funding secured, develop an interactive extended reality map that visitors to the sites can use via their mobile devices to bring alive what occurred during the protests. The archival work will start in September, with workshops set to be announced for early 2026.
“One thing that will hopefully come out of the workshops,” Kemp says, ”will be that, for somebody going through this project, they will be able to see what somebody did 100 years ago in their neighborhood, and for that experience to legitimize protest in a sense.
“The aim is that it will empower people to think that, actually, protesters are not this weird ‘other’ — it is a citizen’s legal right.”
The project, says Waterman, is about providing a “real social benefit” to the community surrounding the university.
“Northeastern puts at its core this idea of experiential learning, which in large part means benefiting a community and producing social change,” says Waterman, who studies the changing nature of the workplace. “Our project is aiming to be a part of that. We’re describing that through this cultivation of critical citizenship.”
Kemp, an assistant professor in creative writing, was inspired to embark on the project after unearthing the “rich history of protest” in the area while researching what is known as the “Wapping dispute” — a bitter yearlong standoff in the 1980s between media tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s U.K. newspapers and the print unions. The study led to a book of poems and images written by Kemp called “Fortress Wapping,” due to be released in July.
Having worked with the Tower Hamlets archive on that previous project, Kemp and Waterman, an assistant professor in English, decided to pair up and delve further into protests that have shaped the east London landscape.
A famous confrontation that they will be looking into is the so-called “Battle of Cable Street” when, on Oct. 4, 1936, the community rallied to halt a march by members of the antisemitic British Union of Fascists — led by Oswald Mosley and known as the “blackshirts” — through what was then the heart of London’s Jewish community.
Other protests the two want to find artifacts for include the Docker Strike of 1889, which helped establish strong trade unions among London dock workers, and the Matchgirls’ Strike the year earlier. The strike by mostly-female employees at a major matches factory in the Bow area led to a women’s union forming and safer working conditions being established.
The Matchgirls’ Strike stuck in the public imagination for its use of shock-style imagery to win support for its cause, Waterman explains. The white phosphorus used to ignite the ends of the matches could cause phosphorus necrosis of the jaw — also known as phossy jaw — which could result in facial disfigurement and even fatal brain damage.
“The white phosphorus used in the production process of making the matches rotted the jaws of the women workers,” Waterman continues.
“Images of that were produced and circulated as a way to raise the emotional temper. There were traditional protests in terms of taking to the streets and marching and so forth. But there was also the circulation of these cultural materials that were published in the press, were discussed in Parliament, and which were really about that emotional appeal of the suffering that this was causing.
“I think that is an example of where you see those cultural materials having some effect. And we want to ask, how did that work? What were the exact mechanisms by which these materials were produced, circulated and consumed? That is what we want to investigate through the archive.”
The strikes and shock tactics had an impact in terms of changing regulations — the Berne Convention in 1906 prohibited the use of white phosphorus in matches.
Kemp points out that “shock and spectacle” continue to be part of demonstrations, as seen in recent environmental and equality protests in the U.K. and elsewhere across the globe.
Activists from Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup at Van Gogh’s glass-protected “Sunflowers” painting at the National Gallery in London in 2022, while those from like-minded group Extinction Rebellion have been known to glue themselves to transport infrastructure and lock themselves onto buildings in a bid to draw attention to the climate crisis.
Anti-protest laws were brought in by Britain’s former Conservative Party government to help police tackle such disruptive tactics. New criminal offenses were introduced to cover activities such as obstructing major transport works and “locking on.”
The study by Waterman and Kemp will look to uncover how protest methods have changed over time and how they continue to adapt to attempts by the law to curb certain demonstration activities.
“What we want to do is facilitate respectful debate about all of this,” adds Waterman, “rather than just a gut reaction that says, ‘Protest is reactionary.’
“It is about actually getting into the details and describing what happened, what kind of materials were used and to think carefully and critically about where some of those lines are — between ethical and unethical, legal and not legal, effective and ineffective.
“It is about bringing that kind of academic consideration to these debates, which can otherwise be really heated and knee-jerk in its reaction.”