From barricades to roundabouts
On Thursday 12 September 2024 at 17:00 at the Labour Museum, French historian Mathilde Larrère and Danish political scientist Anne-Sofie Dichman will decode the Gilets Jaunes movement and its origins.
On 17 September 2018, nearly 300,000 people dressed in reflective vests occupied several roundabouts across France in response to the government's decision to raise fuel taxes. This popular uprising of precarious workers, quickly dubbed the ‘Yellow Vests’, lasted for more than a year and brought President Macron's work to a standstill, especially on climate change. Although the Gilets Jaunes movement had its specific features, particularly linked to social and territorial inequalities in the face of climate change, it also had many points in common with other social movements and is part of a long history of revolts in France and Europe.
Can the popular uprisings of the past help shed light on the present? Who and what are the rebels up against? Who are these people? And who are these women who are all too often invisible in this kind of mobilization, yet are the primary victims of social and climate injustice?
In an attempt to answer these questions, two researchers who specialized in social movements and the status of women, French historian Mathilde Larrère and Danish political scientist Anne-Sofie Dichman, will look back at a little over a hundred years of rebellious history in France, from the Industrial Revolution to the present day, and at how bodies live and resist the contemporary politics of global warming and social and gender inequality.
Mathilde Larrère is a historian and research lecturer at the Université Gustave Eiffel (Paris Est) specializing in social movements in 19th-century France. After writing her PhD on the National Guard in Paris during the July Monarchy, she continued working on feminist movements. In September, she will be publishing a book on the history of the conquest of rights in France.
Anne-Sofie Dichman (b. 1993) holds a PhD in political theory from the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, and is an incoming postdoc at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Through multiyear fieldwork with the Yellow Vests in France, Dichman's PhD examines how French activists think and practice gender, democracy, and climate politics in new ways that provide the basis for conceptualising the socio-ecological concept of sweaty commons.
Book your ticket now by clicking HERE!
- Price: 125 kr
- Price for students: 50 kr
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
- Your ticket gives you access to the museum before or after the lecture.
- Conference in English
- This event is organised as part of the GOLDEN DAYS festival.
