History of Nuclear Campaigning
Talk on the history of French and West German opposition to nuclear energy during and since the 1970s, given at annual Friends of the Earth basecamp at Castleton YHA in the Peak District.
Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany
Monograph published with Oxford University Press. During the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of people across Western Europe protested against civil nuclear energy. Nowhere were they more visible than in France and Germany-two countries where environmentalism seems to have diverged greatly since. This volume recovers the shared, transnational history of the early anti-nuclear movement, showing how…
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Grassroots Transnationalism(s). Franco-German Opposition to Nuclear Energy in the 1970s
Article published in Contemporary European History, vol 25, no. 1 (February 2016), 117-142. Abstract: During the 1970s opposition to nuclear energy was present in countries around the world and thus eminently ‘transnational’. But what did it mean to participate at the grassroots of such a transnational movement and (how) did cross-border connections change protest? This…
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Transnational mais pas trop européen? Le mouvement franco-allemand d’opposition à l’énergie nucléaire dans les années 1970
Présenté à l’Institut historique allemand à Paris dans le cadre du séminaire de recherche « Vers un espace public européen ? Une illustration par les questions environnementales ».
“Power to the Bauer!” Anti-Nuclear Occupations and Rural Space, 1975-1980
Presented at the 2015 annual conference of the German Studies Association in Washington, DC as part of the “Occupy, Blockade, Riot: Seizing Space in the 1970s and 1980s” panel. Abstract: In the course of the 1970s, the occupation of houses, factories, churches, and construction sites became a common denominator of diverse protests across Western Europe…
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Utopia or Dystopia? Cultural Representations of Nuclear Energy in Western European Anti-Nuclear Movements
A collaborative presentation by Karena Kalmbach, Matthias Lieb, Stephen Milder, Andrew Tompkins, and Dick van Lente at the Tensions of Europe conference, Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, Stockholm, 3-6 September 2015. Our analysis focuses on representations of nuclear energy and of the anti-nuclear movement itself within them. Guided by our questioning of the stark contrasts between utopia…
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The Transnational in the Local: The Larzac Plateau as a Site of Transnational Activism since 1970
Article co-written with Robert Gildea and published in Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 50, no. 3 (July 2015), 581-605.
« L’électro-fascisme n’a pas de frontière ! » Deutsch-Französische Anti-AKW-Proteste der 1970er Jahre
Vortrag im Rahmen des Deutsch-Französischen Kolloquiums, Centre Marc Bloch Berlin, 7. Mai 2015.
A Specifically 1970s Transnationalism? Anti-Nuclear Protest in France and West Germany
Presented at the Transformationen der Ökologiebewegung conference, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Berlin, 14-15 November 2014. Abstract: The 1970s were a period in which local and decentralized protest action against nuclear energy collided for the first time with an emerging global environmental consciousness. Were the anti-nuclear protests of that decade therefore unique in their “transnational” nature? Did cross-border interactions…
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Transnational Fusion: Anti-Nuclear Protest in the 1970s and the Rise of the Environmental Movement in West Germany
Invited talk at NYU Berlin, 11 November 2014.
French-German Border: Oberrhein
A short evening trip by car along the Rhine (from Weil am Rhein to Fessenheim) in between other travels.
Beyond ‘New Social Movements’: Transnational Anti-Nuclear Protest in France and West Germany
Presented at the ‘Shaping the 1970s’ workshop at the Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts (University of Bristol), 7 November 2013.
Changing the World, Changing Themselves? Trajectories of Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1968-1981
Presented at the annual conference of the German History Society, Royal Holloway, University of London, 13 September 2013. Abstract: This presentation will trace the trajectories of individual activists through their participation in the movement opposed to civil nuclear energy in the 1970s. In doing so, it will call into question the assumption that anti-nuclear activism…
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« Larzac-Gorleben : même combat » ? Competing Franco-German Solidarities in Local Struggles of the 1970s
Presented at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of French History (SSFH), Cardiff, 30 June 2013. Abstract: Throughout the 1970s, the struggle of 103 farmers against the expansion of a military camp on the Larzac plateau attracted widespread support from French and foreign activists. The farmers of the Larzac cultivated relations with…
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‘Radioactivity Doesn’t Stop at the Border and Neither Do We!’ The Anti-Nuclear Movement along the Franco-German Border, 1968–1981
Presented at Balliol College, University of Oxford, 22 April 2013.