Rooted: Local histories, Memory and Community Action

This panel positions resistance as a lived, collective, and intergenerational practice. ‘Rooted’ is grounded in the experiences of an organisation called Matta Fancanta, a Rastafarian-led grassroots movement in Northampton (UK) after youth mobilised culminating in a squat in 1977. The name ‘Matta Fancanta’ is derived from the West African Wollof and Amharic languages to mean ‘come guard yourself against self-destruction’. Bringing together resistance theory, oral history, and contemporary activism, ‘Rooted’ explores how everyday refusal, occupation, and community building challenge structural exclusion and produce enduring forms of resistance. The first paper on Matta Fancanta’s history presents a history of the youth movement that formed in response to the lack of social and cultural spaces for Black young people in Northampton. Faced with systematic exclusion, they squatted in an disused building - an act of spatial resistance that led to local government formally renting it to them. Drawing on oral history interviews with former members, this paper traces obscured histories of a Black-led resistance and community practice. The second contribution is an ‘in-conversation’ with a former member. This approach centres lived experience, memory, and reflection, challenging the conventional epistemic hierarchies of academia. It illuminates how those now honoured as elders understood their actions in the 70s, how resistance was an everyday practice, and how struggles change. The third paper bridges local histories with contemporary struggles, through a discussion of the work of ‘Blackbird Community Project’ – a grassroots movement also in Northampton. This paper focuses on contemporary community organising nearly 50 years after Matta Fancanta. It examines how knowledge of earlier struggles informs today’s collective action. Drawing on the project’s work bringing local people together, it explores how resistance histories are resources for today’s movements to challenge power. The panel is chaired by a scholar who will situate the three contributions within theoretical debates on resistance. Drawing connections across the papers, the chair will reflect on how resistance works not only to challenge unequal power relations but as a unifying tool rooted in place, memory, and collective care. Finally, the panel argues for understanding resistance as an ongoing relational process that connects past and present, theory and practice, scholarship and community life.