In 2006 two Spaniards came to Manchester. 14 years later, one of them was deputy prime minister of Spain. There’s a rumour that it wouldn’t have happened without AFPP.
AFPP, Alternative Futures and Popular Protest, is an academic conference that has been happening in Manchester since 1995. It is unique in the way in brings together social movement scholars and activists in the same place to talk about their common aim – changing the world.
The first edition was held at Manchester Metropolitan University, organised by two professors from the sociology department, Colin Barker and Dr Mike Tyldesley. 30 years later the location has changed to the University of Manchester, but the spirit of the conference is still the same.
Dr Laurence Davis, who has been attending the conference for over 20 years, said: “If you read carefully the description of what the conferences aim to do, the call for papers every year, it’s bringing together social movements and social movement studies, it’s bringing together social, political and other imaginaries.
“It’s bringing revolutionary theory and practice together with non-revolutionary theory and practice.
“I’ve attended hundreds and hundreds of conferences, given countless conference papers around the world.
“But there’s really a unique spirit at AFPP, bringing together a wide range of disparate fields of study in a way which is very open, which is very welcoming to people coming from different disciplinary backgrounds.”
A large part of this could be because the call for papers, the questions that conference attendees are seeking answers to, has changed little since the 90s. The one major change is expanding into an explicit call for papers that grapple with racial and colonial justice movements.
As of 2025 the conference welcomes research that addresses the following topics:
- contemporary or historical movements and protests from any global region
- theories of social movements, labour movements and revolution
- utopias, experiments in alternative living and everyday politics
- ideologies, imaginaries and strategies of collective action
- opposition to discrimination and confrontations with capitalism, patriarchy or coloniality
According to the AFPP website there is also a spirit of comradely participation, in large part due to the attitudes of the two founders: “Highly established scholars participate on an equal footing to Ph.D students and early career researchers, and ongoing conversations develop across conference sessions, coffee breaks, dinners and sometimes long into the evening.”
Dr Kevin Gillan, one of the successors to Barker and Dr Tyldesley in organising the conference, also highlighted the importance of Manchester as a centre for the study of social movements.
“There’s not loads of academics in this field really in the UK and we’ve got five or six in Manchester – that makes us a significant grouping because it’s just quite a small field,” said Dr Gillan.
But he says that the presence of activists at the conference has also been crucial, and the fact that in most cases the academics are activists themselves.
“Wherever we’ve started, we always end up with that question of what should we be doing.
“And we do definitely see it reflected in the conference all the time.”
Dr Davis also saw this happening: “Of course there are people who are just activists and there are people who are just academics, but I think what has been a strength of the conference is that it’s attracted scholar activists and activist scholars.
“I think that’s one of the most important aspects of the conference, that it breaks down those hard and fast distinctions between activism and scholarship.”
Indeed, at different talks about climate disobedience and Palestine solidarity, researchers were joined by Rev Mark Coleman, who has been arrested multiple times for his activities with Just Stop Oil, and Istahil who organises for Youth Front For Palestine.
It is also clear that Barker had a massive hand in bringing activists and people actually organising in social movements to the conference, especially in the early years.
Barker died in 2019, just before the first time AFPP was held at the University of Manchester. That year’s conference was described by Dr Gillan as “quite strange emotionally”, but also a “fitting tribute” to the academic part of Barker’s life.
In his obituary his decades-long involvement in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Manchester, and later in Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21), were cited as the projects to which he was most dedicated.
Dr John Krinsky, who is likely the most long-standing attendee of AFPP, said: “Colin knew where people were, but he always wanted to learn from them, and he wanted to engage them.
“And then of course he organised AFPP with Mike, and Mike was much more of an intentional communities type of person.
“And they got on well and they said let’s have everybody in the same room, and everybody in between, and see what happens.
“So you would go in to this conference and the beautiful thing was you could never tell whether this was an academic conversation or a political conversation, because it was always both, without sacrificing either piece.”
Dr Krinsky also remembers Colin himself fondly: “Basically, I had never heard anybody tell a story like Colin.
“Maybe it was the accent, his fluency, his little bits of sort of impish sense of humour.
“I often think, both as I’m writing and when I’m in a meeting sometimes, ‘I wonder what Colin would have to say about this?’.”
The anecdote about the Spaniards also came from a conversation Dr Krinsky overheard Barker having: “In 2006 Íñigo Errejón and Pablo Iglesias came – these were later the founders of Podemos in Spain – but they were running with the black block at the time.
“They were complaining that the police had hived off the black block from the rest of the demonstration, he said ‘Well, what do you expect? As soon as you start using those tactics, you’re spending more time running away from the police than you are talking to people and gaining a majority. That’s what you have to do.’
“And then of course seven years later he sends me a one-line e-mail, ‘I think we found our Spaniards’, and there was this big article in the Guardian about Podemos.
“So I don’t know whether that was a life-changing conversation for them, but they went from running with the black block to organising a left populist political party.”
For those who are unaware, Podemos is a Spanish political party that emerged in 2014 and by 2015 was the third largest party in the Spanish legislature under the leadership of Iglesias.
But even these major political actors were still academics as well, something Dr Gillan reiterated: “I think the very common route into the social movements field is to do lots of activism and then try and write a PhD about it.
“And when we try and work out whether social movements have made a difference in particular circumstances, you know it always comes down to the fact that any big change requires multiple things that are going on.
“I think people definitely carry the learning from the conference.”
And there have been hundreds of these people over the years, coming from movements addressing issues from anti-war protests and alter-globalisation to climate crisis and Palestine solidarity.
According to Dr Davis: “I would bet that if you talked with a lot of people at the conference, they’re not just interested in the subject matter from a purely academic point of view – they want to change the world, they want to make the world better.”
But the people who have been coming to AFPP for years also carry something else.
“Weirdly enough, this conference has always given me hope to go back into my activism.
“Which is a very funny thing for an activist-academic conference to do because it can often do the opposite,” said Dr Krinsky.
Dr Davis also said: “I think with respect to hope and a sense of the possibilities of social change, that one of the most important things is the sense of community.
“Historically, fascism thrives on fear.
“It thrives on division, and from my perspective, the most effective antidote to that sort of deeply authoritarian, very violent, destructive politics, is solidarity.
“And participating in social movements and the sense of community that comes from that is a wonderful antidote to that sense of ‘I’m isolated, I’m powerless, there’s nothing I can do to change things’.
“And obviously these conferences are not social movements themselves, but I think you get a sort of sense of community from this and a sense of solidarity.”
It is clear that AFPP has made its impact not just on Manchester, but the world.
As it celebrates its 30th anniversary, the revolutionary energy that Barker brought to AFPP is clearly still there, and his hope for a better future lives on.
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Featured image: AFPP
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