Women's Peace Camps: A Transnational Network, 1981-2000
This path explores the transnational network of women's peace camp movements. Women's peace camps from Greenham Common in England to Seneca, New York and the Puget Sound, Washington in the United States represent a transnational network of activists grounded in place-based demonstrations. Their place-based activism created opportunities to increase public awareness of the antinuclear movement. Their camps displayed the contrasts between feminine and masculine; war and peace.
The constructed dichotomy between "masculine" war and militarism and "feminine" peace is a key site of inquiry in peace historiography that can be further explored through the study of women's peace camps during the Cold War.
Project Goals
- Visualize the spatial relationships between women's peace camps
- Visualize the transnational networks of activists fostered by each camp
- Create a centralized bibliography/resource center that includes sources on women's peace camps, especially archival sources and digital projects
Preliminary Findings
- Place-based activism at women's peace camps provides a model for "shared" spaces and activist communities of practice in the post Cold War period such as the No DAPL Movement at Standing Rock and the Occupy Wall Street movements. These movements take imagined shared space a step further with use of social media and the internet to express place-based solidarity.
Note: This digital humanities project is under development.