Contents

• July theme – Music, Art and Storytelling
• Outreach news
• Poetry Workshops with Nabeela Ahmed
• The Radical Book Club
• News from the Collection
• Book of the month

July theme – Music, Art and Storytelling

Music, art and storytelling are all powerful tools to unify people, build solidarity and shape our approaches to social change, providing a shared emotional outlet, helping to raise morale, and give a voice to marginalised communities. Songs can effectively communicate complex messages of protest, hope, and resistance, making them accessible and memorable to a broad audience. Poetry invites us to think beyond the political context, moving us into the more subjective worlds of emotion and feeling. Art can help us to communicate in a way that surpasses words and language altogether.

Equally, we cannot separate these different forms of artistic expression from the people that made them, or the context they were working in. Different art forms can offer us a glimpse into the world that the artist was living in and how it impacted them, and what they felt about it. Equally, understanding the tools available to creatives at the time – where they came from, how they were used, their limitations or scarcity, and how they developed and changed – is a different lens to deepen our understanding of movements and social change.

You can find our “music, and and storytelling” subject guide and reading list here.

Outreach news

In June Commonweal attended the Northern Race Equality Conference held at the University of Leeds and organised by Race Equality Network, Ella Baker School of Organising and Racial Justice Network. This was a fabulous event and such an inspiring day. At the Commonweal stall we meet lots of people and were able to share items from the Collection relating to themes in the conference.

For the No Homework Necessary Book Club in collaboration with the 1 in 12 Library Collective and the People’s Care Movement, Commonweal shared resources from the Collection around migration and sanctuary seeking.

We were also able to support the first meeting of the Bradford Peace Forum, where there was a brilliant meeting of people all working towards a peaceful world.

We ended the month with an open day in the Collection, and it was fantastic to show people some of the books, pamphlets and journals we hold.

Please get in touch with our outreach worker by emailing commonwealoutreach@peacemuseum.org.uk if you would like to find out more about Commonweal, book us to attend events, or request a tour of the Collection.

Poetry Workshops with Nabeela Ahmed – Thursday 16th July & Wednesday 29th July

Join us at the library on Thursday 16th July and Wednesday 29th July from 10:00am – 12:00pm in the JB Priestley Library, ground floor, University of Bradford, Richmond Road, BD7 1DP.

Explore creating your own poetry responding to items from the Commonweal Collection. The poetry workshops will be facilitated by Nabeela Ahmed.

Nabeela Ahmed is a writer, multilingual poet and spoken word artist. Her debut poetry collection, From Kashmir to Yorkshire, was launched at Bradford Literature Festival in 2025. She hosts Bradford Writes, which platforms regional published writers and the only public Pahari Mushaira in Britain. She has featured on Word of Mouth with Michael Rosen on Radio 4 and The Verb. Her project for City of Culture Bradford delivered two new bilingual anthologies. She has been the Travelling Poet for Word Up North and one of the core poets for BBC’s Contains Strong Language. The Royal Literary Fund supported her monologue, A Woman’s Work. Her first play was featured at Theatre in The Mill through Kali Theatre. She undertook a translator’s sl residency at the National Centre for Writing and is translating the epic, Saif ul-Malook.

Booking is essential (workshops for ages 18 and over):

To book a FREE place at one or both workshops please book via the ticket tailor links below:

Thursday 16th July

Wednesday 29th July

For more information please email Commonweal Outreach Worker Emma Goodway: commonwealoutreach@peacemuseum.org.uk

The Radical Book Club

Welcome to The Radical Book Club!
A collaboration between Race Equality Network and Commonweal.

The Radical Book Club is a space to have engaging discussions on topics related to racial justice, human rights, community, and ways to build a better world together.

We are excited to share that our second book is The Migrant Art of Coping by Sohail Jannesari.

Book Club Details
Date: Wednesday 29th July
Location: Bradford Mechanics Institute, 76 Kirkgate, BD1 1SZ
Time: 6:00pm – 8:00pm

About The Migrant Art of Coping
Refugees don’t just survive displacement, they build strength, community, and new ways of coping that challenge everything we know about mental health.

The Migrant Art of Coping shares stories of refugees navigating harsh borders, restrictive laws, and failing support systems. Drawing on their words, experiences, and creative practices, each chapter offers insights and activities on belonging, care, and survival.

Whether you’re a mental health professional, someone who cares about sanctuary seekers, or simply curious about how people find hope in the face of upheaval, this book will shift the way you see wellbeing, identity, and healing.

To access a copy of The Migrant Art of Coping, please email fatima@raceequalitynetwork.org.uk.

Booking is essential (book club for ages 18 and over)

To book a FREE place please book via the eventbrite link here

We look forward to reading, reflecting, and discussing this powerful book together, and we hope to see you there!

News from the Collection

We have added an exciting array of new books to the collection since our last email, exploring economics, feminism, the climate crisis, migration rights and colonialism:

• Rhythms of Resistance: African Musical Heritage in Brazil
• Tactical performance  : the theory and practice of serious play
• DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain
• Internet for the people: the fight for our digital future
• Erotic islands : art and activism in the queer Caribbean
• Gaza : the story of a genocide
• Culture strike : art and museums in an age of protest
• The Palestine Laboratory
• The future we choose : surviving the climate crisis
• The people : the rise and fall of the working class
• The transition handbook : from oil dependency to local resilience
• A wide net of solidarity : anti-racism and anti-imperialism from the Americas to the Globe
• Insurgent visions : feminism, justice, solidarity
• Rosa Parks & Claudette Colvin : civil rights heroes
• We are ‘nature’ defending itself : entangling art, activism and autonomous zones

You can find all of these books in the Collection now. Here is a link to the University online catalogue to search for books from the Collection.

Book of the month

Our book of the month is Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribeean, by Lyndon K. Gill, an exciting new book which foregrounds the queer histories of Carnival, calypso, and HIV/AIDS in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, drawing on theories and ideas from black studies, queer studies and anthropology to explore .

Beautifully written and illustrated, Erotic Islands explores “the sophisticated strategies same-­sex-­ desiring Ca­rib­bean artists and activists have used to make social and cultural interventions… clearing space for themselves in the public domain through artistic expression and community-­building techniques.”

The book is available in the Commonweal Collection now – you can check its status here.

The Commonweal Charity Trust has received a large donation from Brisbane, Australia.

Dr Mark Hayes is a retired Australian media and journalism academic who did his MA in peace studies at Bradford University in 1981 to 1982, and worked as a journalist for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). He also taught journalism at several Australian universities, and the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji, in the immediate aftermath of the 2000 Fiji putsch.

Dr Hayes explained his decision to donate to the Commonweal:

“I had a wonderful time studying in Bradford, and what I learned doing my MA has stood with me ever since. I still recall lecturers like Drs Nigel Young and Paul Rogers who inspired and challenged me, and meeting scholars like Dr Gene Sharp, who visited the School of Peace Studies while I was there.”

“I completed my PhD in 1995, entitled ‘Domination and Peace Research’, significantly building on my MA thesis, and the theory and research I deployed there has major implications for peace research, journalism and civil resistance. Though many years have passed since, I have kept across relevant scholarship in the several fields I traversed, and my PhD still stands up as a contribution to theories and critiques of domination and peace research.”

Dr Hayes recalled the Commonweal specialist peace and social movements library, and when he was able, he wanted to make a donation to assist the library in its work.

“So I got in touch with the Commonweal Library people, we discussed what I wanted to do and why, and I sent them my donation.”

Heather Blakey, the chair of The Commonweal Trust said “We are very grateful to Dr. Mark Hayes for his kind donation to the Commonweal, which will be used to sustain our Collection in the future, ensuring that books and other resources about nonviolent social change are accessible to an increasing number of people from a wide range of backgrounds.”

Maybe it’s just me – but I suspect it’s not just me – but hope seems in short supply at the moment. The weather certainly doesn’t help, but it’s not fair to just blame the Bradford rain when the day-to-day newspaper headlines repeatedly paint a picture of a world spiralling, which couples with the longer term, more insidious sense of heaviness, of unease.

But our book of the month is called Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit, was written in 2003 and early 2004, “written against the tremendous despair at the height of the Bush administration’s powers and the outset of the war in Iraq”. I was born in 1988, 9/11 happened when I was 11 years old, the invasion of Iraq when I was around 13 – as a “millenial” Solnit is writing about a period of time that defined my own worldview and that of many activists my age. At the time – and, now I think about it, ever since – cynicism felt like a blanket, a buffer against a world that seemed content with hurtling over a precipice. “I can take the despair, it’s the hope I can’t stand…”

When so much is at stake, it makes sense to frame the world in binaries – either we win and the war doesn’t happen or the whales don’t go extinct, or we lose, and millions die. 

Solnit invites us to look at the world and where we should look for hope very differently – less in terms of outcomes (whether we win or lose), and more in the process, the relationships, the act of building something together. In her analysis of movements and organising over several decades, Solnit finds hope in the way our movements have adapted and changed, finding new ways to communicate and organise, a readiness to challenge “leadership cults”, the wide embrace of an anti-doctrinal plurality, and a rejection of “the static utopia in favor of the improvisational journey”.

She also sets out to remind us that cause-and-effect is often difficult to understand and recognise, and that we often fail to recognise or embrace the huge cultural impacts of activism – either historically or currently. Learning about what movements have achieved less in terms of their campaign “wins” but what they achieved in their organising. How did they empower their communities? What was the long term cultural impact of their work? What used to be “normal” that is now unthinkable? What transformation occurred in an individual, or a group of people, or a home, or a workplace, or…? In a 2016 reflection on her book ten years after it was published, Solnitt quotes Patrisse Cullors, a founder of Black Lives Matter, who said that BLMs goal was to “provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams”.

Solnit invites us to look for hope in the cracks and the margins and the edges – not in a naive “everything will be ok” sort ofway, but in the future’s uncertainty, in the simple fact that no one knows what will happen next. That uncertainty is terrifying, but it’s also a crack in which we can place ourselves – and we can’t do that without a little bit of hope.

In a world that feels increasingly fraught, violent, laden with intersecting crises, putting time and energy into thinking about something like friendship might feel a bit wasteful, even a little self-indulgent. The first pages of our book of the month – Friends in Common, by Laura C. Foster and Joel White – immediately challenges us to think about friendship as a cornerstone of our movements, which frames the rest of this powerful and engaging book.

Friends in Common opens with an extended quotation from Yvonne, the co-founder of Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment (MORE), who shares her experience of detention in the Yarlswood Immigration Centre. Yvonne describes the “domino effect” of the solidarity she experienced from members of Glasgow’s Unity Centre and how it encouraged her to support others in detention, before reminding us that such work has to be rooted in a “love for humanity” that doesn’t reduce people to a “cause”. This tension – between what we want to achieve, and how we want to go about achieving it, means and ends, goals and methods – will be well known to anyone who has been involved in activism and organising. Friends in Common makes an uncompromising case for thinking about and reflecting on friendship as more than an incidental by-product of our campaigning and activism, (“not peripheral to the real intellectual ‘meat’ of political ideas”) but as an essential foundation of building a better world. Many people who have been involved in grassroots activism will instinctively know this, that the relational bonds built through months, years, decades of working together are as important as the goals the group is working towards. However, we can still be guilty of undervaluing the importance of relationships and bonds of trust, and find ourselves taking on some of the individualistic norms we see in wider society. 

I want to draw out two key threads in the book that I found particularly helpful: exploring communication in the digital age, and trust.

Communication in the digital age

Social media is a key theme throughout the book, which makes sense! Many people’s lives are now completely interwoven with social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and others. Facebook and Instagram have over 3 billion monthly active users, Tiktok 1.5 billion, and X has over 500 million. While these platforms have become an essential tool to mobilising and activism, they are also part of why many people experience life in a very atomised way which leaves relationships feeling very transactional. 

Forster and White argue that social media platforms have tried to “co-opt, contain and destroy relational bonds”, and many of us will recognise how social media is fuelling a competitive and accumulative version of friendship defined less by informal interactions and bond-building and more by individuals presenting versions of themselves that they believe will be attractive or interesting to others.

When our friendships are mediated by social media platforms we might end up more “knowing of” people, rather than knowing them in a way that builds the sorts of trust and bonds that are essential to effective organising.  As more and more people become reliant on platforms like Facebook and X to earn incomes, advertise their work, and “build a personal brand” Forster and White challenge us to think about the way “ambient friendships” sustained through social media are reducing us to think about friendships in terms of “productivity”. The nature of the space that we interact frames the nature of those relationships; social media platforms might present themselves as neutral, but they are actually cleverly designed structures that have a huge impact on the way we relate to others.

Balancing the power of social media platforms with their many and often insidious problems is a challenge. What should we share, and who should we connect with? What should we keep “offline”? 

Trust

The other key theme I wanted to highlight is around “trust”, which I think of as foundational to my own interpersonal relationships, but also to the way our movements function. Trusting that people will follow through on what they’ve said they will do is both foundational to movements and organising, and when there is a breakdown of trust it can be difficult to rebuild. The degree to which we trust the people around is perhaps a luxury we don’t identify unless we don’t have it – many groups and organisations have fallen apart simply because trust among members has become irrevocable.

There has been significant coverage in recent years of the “spy cops” scandal. Over 140 undercover police officers infiltrated more than 1,000 political organisations in what one of the key agents described as a “black operation”, a highly secretive process designed to gather information and disrupt the activities of political groups in the UK. The officers sought to abuse the trust others placed in them in order to embed themselves in the personal lives of people they met through these activities. They regularly built intimate and long-term relationships with activists, and even had children with people they were monitoring. Since 2010 several of the police officers involved have been identified, and an inquiry into the issue began in 2020.

Friends in Common places the spy cops scandal in a historical context, highlighting the many and varied ways that authorities have sought to disrupt protest or revolutionary activity by embedding spies, informers and even agent provocateurs among those seeking to challenge powerholders and instigate social change. Forster and White explain that “infiltrating and fabricating friendship has long been a strategy of the state…the explicit strategies of these agents include deliberate and sustained attempts to create intimacies, and to penetrate intimate and informal spaces, be they bedrooms, bathrooms or barrooms.” and that as well as gathering information and reporting on plans and activities, the role of such infiltration (drawing on an example of FBI agents infiltration of the Black Panther Party and the anti-Vietnam war movement) as creating “suspicion, isolation and loneliness” within organisations and movements. We could think of these activities as a conscious attempt to weaponise trust, a way of using the very human bonds that are built through activism to undermine attempts to organise, challenge, and resist.

While the impact of such behaviour by security forces is shocking and upsetting (and, for those who experience the deceit and deception directly, it can be deeply traumatic), Forster and White also argue that the amount of energy and resources put into these activities “signal the revolutionary importance of friendship”, that because friendship is “policed as a threat” we should recognise its central importance to our ability to build lasting social change.

The question we are perhaps left with is: in a climate where even people we think we know and trust deeply – perhaps even love – could be weaponising such human tendencies against us, how do we continue to trust others? Forster and White have an almost counterintuitive answer – to “dig deeper into bonds of real friendship”, pointing to the story of Lisa. Lisa received an email from her former partner “Mark Stone”, asking for forgiveness. Considering the deceit and betrayal Lisa experienced we might expect her to never trust again, but instead she explains “I’m being shown such a huge amount of fiercely true love from so many incredible people that I can’t let down. I choose them.”

In an age where more of our activism takes place online, where we have the potential to be connected to people from anywhere, and where state surveillance and limits on the right to protest and organise are increasing, Friends in Common is both inspiring and refreshing, and gently provocative and challenging, a thought-provoking reflection on the nature of the bonds of friendship that are the scaffolding of our work to build a different world.

Friends in Common was published in June 2025 by Pluto Press. We hold a copy in the Commonweal Collection, and you can check its status here

In recent weeks there has been lots of coverage in the British media about the hunger strikes conducted by a number of people who are being held in prison on remand, awaiting trial for a range of offences related to involvement in Palestine Action. At the time of writing, two hunger strikers have gone without food for 50 days and have been hospitalized.

Many of us will have a deep, emotional reaction to these stories – knowing that people are refusing food to the point where they are risking their lives might be upsetting or troubling. Even those in agreement with their aims and objectives might ask what has driven someone to refuse food? What could be so important that people would risk their own wellbeing – even life – in such a way?

When imprisoned, people lack many of rights and freedoms, and throughout history hunger strikes have been used by those in prison to demand changes to their living conditions or for wider political changes. The Commonweal Collection has a range of resources that explore the history of hunger strikes by activists in the UK and around the world; reading their experiences can help us to understand what motivates people who choose to take part in hunger strikes.

Irish republicans

The first book that jumps out is Hunger Strike: reflections on the Hunger Strike, edited by Danny Morrison. Hunger Strikes explores the history and impact of the hunger strikes carried out by Irish republicans who were imprisoned in the 1980s, many because of their involvement in Irish republican paramilitary groups. The book is made up of contributions from forty-nine different writers, politicians, poets, playwrights and activists and includes essays, poems and photographs. The book starts with a history of the blanket protest and ‘dirty’ protest, and the hunger strike that began on 1st March 1981, but the majority is short chapters detailing the experiences of hunger strikers, mediators, family members, and others who observed the hunger strikes.

Gandhi

The Commonweal Collection holds a large number of books related to Gandhi, who undertook several fasts and hunger strikes for a number of reasons throughout the Indian Independence campaign, including as a protest against “untouchability” and outbreaks of violence by different groups, to demand the release of political prisoners, and in support of Muslim-Hindu unity. Gandhi began a number of indefinite hunger strikes, and the longest he went without food was 21 days.

In the Commonweal Collection, The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi by Robert Payne shares details of the fasts and hunger strikes undertaken by Gandhi throughout his satyagraha campaign in India.

Suffragettes

The first Suffragette to go on hunger strike in prison was Marion Wallace Dunlop, who was incarcerated as a “second division” prisoner – she wanted to be reclassed as a “first division” political prisoner. She was released after 91 hours, and while this was the initial reaction by the authorities to other Suffragettes, eventually the response changed. Prison authorities began to use the violent, gruesome tactic of force feeding.

American women also took part in hunger strikes, including Alice Paul, who became a leader of the American movement for women’s suffrage after spending time in the UK.

The Commonweal Collection holds a number of books about the Suffragettes, including Sylvia Pankhurt’s The Suffrage Movement, which shares details of the Suffragette’s hunger strikes.