Celia Hughes
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The student movement and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign
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This chapter examines the political, cultural and socio-psychological experiences students underwent within the left milieux (encompassing Labour clubs, socialist societies, Marxist societies, and Trotskyist groups) at metropolitan and provincial universities, across England in the mid-to-late 1960s. It explores the relationship between the student movement and the growth of the late 1960s activist scene around the VSC. Attention is given to the relationship between memory, identity and cultural representations of 1968 to explore what the composition of remembered narratives reveals about the key factors shaping activism as a liberating subjective condition. Discussion includes students’ interactions with left groups on university campuses, radical reading experiences, and activism in docks, strikes and student protests, which opened up new possibilities of being.

The chapter uncovers an ambiguous gendered landscape, where alongside opportunities for social and sexual agency, female students sometimes also experienced emotional tensions, as perceptions of gendered social difference lay hidden beneath other more prominent registers of selfhood that prevailed during these years – class, intellectual identity, and international solidarity.

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Young lives on the Left

Sixties activism and the liberation of the self

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