Emily Sharp
Northumbria University
What I Want to Talk About
I am a current PhD student at Northumbria University working on a project titled: ‘The National Union of Students and its Internationalisms: British Students and Transnational Solidarity from the 1950s to the 2000s’. This is a Collaborative Doctoral Award funded by the AHRC (Northern Bridge Consortium) in partnership with NUS. I have always been interested in the history of social movements and popular mobilisations, especially around the international and transnational connections between activists and networks across borders. Whilst at the University of Glasgow I was lucky enough to take part in a placement at the university archives where I uncovered a plethora of materials on Glasgow student activism for the Anti-Apartheid Movement and then conducted my MLitt thesis on this topic. My current project extends this research to look specifically at the role of the National
Union of Students as a mobilising force for students around international issues. Looking at the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Chile and Palestine solidarity campaigns over the course of the second half of the twentieth century my research seeks to uncover the different kinds of local and national level campaigns that British students were involved in and to highlight the impat that these kinds of pressure group politics and student activism in particular has had on the wider international solidarity campaigns, and, ultimately, on international politics. As part of this project I am conducting oral history interviews with former student activists from both within and outside the NUS, so please do get in touch with me at emily4.sharp@northumbria.ac.uk if you would like to discuss this project or your participation in international student campaigns further.
More About Me
