Stories of feminist collective research practices on-of-for-with(in) Greenham Common archives

Performed through a series of fragmented stories, this “body of work” (this thesis) tells of research on-of-for-with(in) Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp archives, exploring how this movement and its archive collections are “contact sites” for interconnected struggles past-present-future and for Feminist Collective Research Practices. Initially established in 1981 as an anti-nuclear peace camp protesting against the siting of US cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, England, the site was occupied until 1999. During this period, Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp grew into a worldwide movement linking with a multitude of intersecting struggles. Greenham Common archive materials document multi-polar movements and histories, telling polyvocal stories of many women and many matters entangled in a web of feminist, queer, anti-nuclear, anti-colonial, and ecological activism, amongst other stands of resistance to the patriarchal-colonial-capitalist complex. Responding to these archives, where movements interconnect, and past-present-future is scrambled, I–with others–explore how collectively “re-reading” and “re-turning” stories on-of-for-with(in) Greenham Common archives can speak to our current context and possible futures. What might we learn from this movement? In what ways does Greenham carry on? What role does “re-turning” our pasts have in storying our futures? In addition to using the archives for re-reading the multi-histories of Greenham Common, I position them as a site for exploring Feminist Collective Research Practices: a mode of practice and a curatorial project initially devised by myself and further developed through various collaborations. Working with Greenham Common archives is used as a methodology, lens, and subject. This thesis documents and “stories” examples of feminist collective research in practice through a series of archive research visits, collaborations, conversations and collaborative study groups. Throughout the thesis, I employ a range of methods for storying this collective research on-of-for-with(in) Greenham Common archives. While some stories are recalled through a method of auto-theory, others take the form of “critical fabulation” informed by gossips and gaps in the archive. I write with a multiplicity of protagonists, references and contributions; through different methods of citation, I indicate when text is not my own. Running parallel to the stories, Notes on method(s) meander through the pages offering insight into practices and processes, sometimes adding to the story, other times disrupting it. Presented as an unruly archive—of disparate but interconnecting stories, documents, poems, correspondences, reflections, speculations, reconfigurations and gossip—a linear journey through the thesis is not compulsory, but to assist with orientation, I would suggest beginning with the section “codes for reading”