People's Park Movement

Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture 2015 Danky Fellowship Lecture

Thursday, October 15, 4 p.m., 4191 Helen C. White Hall (inside the SLIS Library)

Kera Lovell, Purdue University

In this presentation, Kera Lovell will present a portion of her dissertation on the "People's Park" movement, titled "Radical Manifest Destiny: Urban Renewal, Colonialism, and Transnational American Identity in the Urban Spatial Politics of the Postwar Left." Beginning with Berkeley's People Park in 1969, coalitions of activists and students throughout the United States and abroad protested by permanently occupying vacant lots and converting them into shared socialist green spaces.  Ms. Lovell has documented more than three-dozen People’s Parks from Berkeley to South Africa, with nearly a dozen concentrated in the Midwest.  In her presentation Ms. Lovell will shed light on a few key case studies in an effort to understand the visual and rhetorical strategies activists used to equate their peaceful occupancies with territorial reclamations.  Ms. Lovell will conclude by presenting her preliminary findings on Madison's own activist-created park, James Rector's People's Park, and situate this site within a transnational movement of spatial and environmental protest.  

The event is free of charge

Anna Palmer

Continuing Education Services

UW-Madison, SLIS

263-4452

http://www.slis.wisc.edu/continueed.htm