By John Maiden 

On 18 January 2024, the Open University and the project Religious Toleration and Peace (RETOPEA), was mentioned as an “exciting” teaching innovation during a Lords Grand Committee on Religious Education in schools. The project was described as presenting young people with an opportunity to “think outside the box about their own experiences of religious diversity, tolerance and intolerance”. The following week, the OU team was able to follow up on this with an education policy briefing event in Westminster. Here we presented some of the outcomes and potentialities of the project, and particularly our ‘Docutubes’ methodology. This is an approach through which young people have been encouraged to learn creatively about religious diversity in past, present and their own experiences, by writing, making and editing their own short films.

The Docutubes approach was first developed as part of a Horizon 2020 funded project in collaboration with various universities and partners across Europe. Since this has ended, further support from the Culham St Gabriel Trust and the OU’s Open Societal Challenges programme, has enabled the OU team to test the methodology in a number of new contexts, including the Muslim-majority countries of Albania and Jordan, in a wider range of English schools, and in both a Protestant and Catholic school in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

In the first half of the policy event, members of the project team, John Maiden, Stefanie Sinclair and John Wolffe, along with Karel Van Nieuwenhuyse, a RETOPEA colleague from KU Leuven, explained the Docutubes approach. We spoke about how engaging young people with an accessible online archive of primary sources – ‘thinking like historians’ – and then the creative learning approach of Docutubes, had demonstrated the potential to address common ‘presentist’ understandings of the religious diversity. Specifically, the approach is able to challenge the widely held views about the past which associate religion with conflict. We then heard from two educators, Richard Brown (Head Teacher, Urswick School, London) and Ruairi Geehan (Mercy College, Belfast) about their experiences of RETOPEA, as well as Dr Renee Hattar, Director of the Jordanian Royal Institute of Interfaith Studies, which hosted a Doctubes workshop in 2023. Finally, a young people who had experienced a Docutubes workshop described his own positive experiences of the project, working alongside young people from other religious traditions, in the context of an interfaith youth camp organised by the Rose Castle Foundation.

In the second half (pictured), we heard responses from expert practitioners in the fields of teaching, peace-making and interfaith: Helen Snelson (Teacher Education, University of York, Chair of the Historical Association’s Secondary Committee and a EuroClio Ambassador); Rosie Dawson (Freelance religion journalist, documentary maker and radio producer); David Porter (Strategy Consultant for the Archbishop of Canterbury); Riaz Ravat (Contributor to the Commission on Islam in the UK, Prime Minister’s Extremism Task Force and the Commission on Religion & Belief in Public Life). Here, there was enthusiasm for the approach, and particularly how it might provide spaces for young people to talk with each other about potentially difficult or controversial issues in constructive ways. There were also challenges. How can we help ‘time poor’ teachers, for example of History and RE, to incorporate Docutubes into their curriculum? Given that negative views about religious diversity often begin in the home, are there ways in which Docutubes could equip teachers and young people to challenge stereotypes and generalisations which might learned from parents and family?

The OU team plan to continue to develop and expand the use of the Docutubes methodology, and this event enabled us both to raise awareness and see new potentialities. We are grateful to all the participants for their contributions.

Watch this space! And in the meantime, for more information on the Docutubes approach, see this OU Badged Open Course.

By Jackie Hosein 

When researching a particular topic, place, or time, ephemera – newspapers, magazines, leaflets, posters, and so on – can be a valuable source of information and context. My research is currently focused on the town of Glastonbury and its role in the New Age from the mid-1980s and, as might be expected from a place with an active alternative community, there is a rich history of ephemera from that time.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there were several Glastonbury-based publications reflecting local events and interests. Some only ran for a few issues or even just one, but still gave an insight into the debates and preoccupations of the time. One of the earliest of these was The Torc edited by Patrick Benham which ran for fifteen issues, from 1971 to 1975. The first issue featured articles on psychometry on Glastonbury Tor, and the yin and yang of food, as well as local events, news, recipes, poetry, and for sale adverts. A short-lived title The Glastonbury Thorn, produced two issues; 1979 and 1980, and represented a feminist viewpoint (see Figure 1). It was edited by Kathy Jones, who went on to establish the Goddess community and conference in Glastonbury.

Figure 1. The Glastonbury Thorn

At this point, there was a relatively small alternative community, and few New Age businesses of events, in Glastonbury. The mid-1980s saw a shift in the town. Local manufacturers had closed, and in the recession of the early 1980s chain stores disappeared from the High Street and existing local shops struggled to stay open. However, the town’s proximity to the Glastonbury Festival, and growing reputation as a New Age centre, attracted people involved in Green politics and the festival circuit. The government’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme was set up around this time to help small businesses, requiring only a start-up bank balance of £1000. This created opportunities for New Age businesses and initiatives catering for the increasing number of visitors coming to Glastonbury to experience its spiritual side. Local legend tells of the same £1000 being passed round to several potential entrepreneurs before being returned to its original owner.

The Glastonbury Communicator started as a newsletter about events at the Assembly Rooms, which had been restored and run by the local community as an arts and performance space. It expanded to include other news and events in Glastonbury, and ran for eighteen issues, 1984 to 1988. Local, national, and international news was featured, ranging from concerns about local limestone paving slabs to several articles highlighting the famine in Eritrea.

Unique Publications, which holds an archive of many of the publications mentioned in this article, is a small business started in 1985 by Bruce Garrard. Like several others, he had settled in Glastonbury after being evicted from the peace camp at Molesworth, and was subsidised initially by the previously mentioned Enterprise Allowance Scheme. Unique Publications published The Times of Avalonia (see Figure 2), described by Garrard as a satirical response to the excesses of the local press at a time when New Age travellers, camped at nearby Greenlands Farm in the aftermath of the Battle of the Beanfield, were the target of local outrage. It ran for eleven issues from 1985 to 1988. Its successor, The Glastonbury Gazette (see Figure 3), was an attempt to go more mainstream in its coverage, for example publishing a series of more balanced articles about the travellers. It ran for seven monthly issues in 1989. Renamed the Glastonbury Times, it ran for a further five issues from 1990 to 1991.

Figure 2. The Times of Avalonia            Figure 3. The Glastonbury Gazette

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By Maria Nita

Saturday, 11th November 2023, Armistice Day. Since the beginning of the war in Gaza in October 2023 weekly pro-Palestinian protest marches have been held in London, on a Saturday. On this occasion the march started at midday, an hour after the solemn annual ceremony at the Cenotaph – albeit this was eventually disrupted by a group of far-right counter-protestors attempting to reach the pro-Palestinian march and clashing with police.  

Children’s Shoes Memorial – Extinction Rebellion protest action, November 2023, London (Photo Copyright: Extinction Rebellion Families)

In Trafalgar Square Extinction Rebellion activists showed their support for the pro-Palestinian march by staging an evocative children’s shoes memorial, for both Israeli and Palestinian young victims. Shoe memorials that mark collective tragedies draw inspiration from those commemorating the genocide against Jewish people, with well-known displays in the Holocaust memorial museums of Auschwitz and Washington DC. Based on some of the public accusations against the pro-Palestinian marches being antisemitic – they were called ‘hate marches’ by ex-Home Secretary Suella Braverman – even an inadvertent connection with the Jewish genocide may strike people as inappropriate, but it is important to emphasise what many protestors have stressed in public statements, namely that the marches are pro-Palestinian, not anti-Jewish. 

Protestors are accusing the Israeli state of war crimes, and not the Jewish nation. Moreover, the ‘Jews for Ceasefire’ group have also been attending the pro-Palestinian marches, to oppose both the war crimes being committed by the Israeli state, as well as the criminal actions of Hamas – the terrorist group who, on the 7th of October 2023, attacked Jewish communities, killing civilians and taking hostages, including children.  

The pro-Palestinian march, which started in Hyde Park and ended in front of the US embassy, called for the UK and US governments to ask Israel for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Many of the protestors’ placards pointed a finger to the seeming silent complicity of the UK and US governments for their failure to denounce and sanction the state of Israel, with such slogans as: ‘the UK and US shield Israel from accountability for its political crimes’, ‘their blood on your hands’, ‘bombing babies and killing children is not self-defence’, ‘genocide is not self-defence’, ‘stop war crimes in Gaza’, ‘it’s not complicated, it’s genocide’, ‘I can’t believe I have to protest against Genocide’, ‘one child is being killed every 10 minutes in Gaza’, ‘cease fire now allow aid in Gaza’, ‘stop the massacre’. 

Protest action, November 2023, Edinburgh (Photo: David Robertson)

Globally, since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, there has been a rise in both antisemitic and Islamophobic motivated crimes, especially in the US, UK and Europe. At the peaceful 11 November 2023 pro-Palestinian march, with an attendance of some 300,000 people, the police reported that only a very small number of participants were being investigated for antisemitic statements – yet is important to distinguish between some of the statements of support to Palestine that are understood by some groups (but not others) as antisemitic, and the comparatively small amount of overt antisemitism at the events. The controversial chant ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’ was interpreted by some as a call for the destruction of the state of Israel – in other words where would the state of Israel be, if Palestine were to take up the territory from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea? Protesters defended the chant in media statements, explaining that it refers to freedom, self-determination and equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis, and an end to what has been described in some media and scholarship as the Israeli apartheid of Palestinians in Israel and the Palestinian territories (Pappé, ed. 2021; Rifkin, 2017). Protest banners citing late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish sought to give voice to this collective experience of suffering of alienation, pointing beyond the current crisis: ‘“If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears”’. 

Protest action, November 2023, Edinburgh (Photo: David Robertson)

Criticism and debate emerged from the fact that the pro-Palestinian march was going to be taking place on Armistice Day. The disagreement exposed the deeper ambiguity of Armistice Day: on one hand, recalling the atrocities of war and the need to build and maintain peace, whilst on the other hand, glorifying war through notions of martyrdom and the celebration of veterans – for an in-depth discussion of a century-long history around the complexities and controversies of the day, see Wolffe, 2019. Yet pro-Palestinian protestors on the Armistice Day march addressed the criticism of the march being disrespectful on their protest banners, by pointing to the appropriateness of asking for a ceasefire on such a day. Their slogans read: ‘Remembrance = action we take to prevent all wars’ and ‘Armistice for Palestine’. The controversy around holding the protest on Armistice Day brought up to the intersectionality of religious identity and issues of racial and ethnic equality and conflict, with protestors proclaiming on their banners: ‘“Never Forget” is not reserved for white people’ – thus addressing the far-right declared intention to keep the day as a national event. 

The media and social media had abounded in claims about pro-Palestinian marches being infiltrated by Hamas sympathisers. Hamas, from ‘Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah’ (HMS) meaning ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’ – is a violent, fundamentalist movement founded 1987, with roots in the post-colonial era of the early 20th century, when European powers had colonised much of the Middle East. This means the movement has been active for close to 4 decades, drawing on a deeply rooted anti-colonial ideology. It is thus worth remembering that whilst the present humanitarian crisis in Gaza is unprecedented, the impact of the decades long Israeli – Palestinian conflict is not new, and its ongoing trauma has global reverberations and connections to ethnic and religious identities.  

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Maria Nita

Let me first take you back some 47 years. It is 19^th of June 1976 at Stonehenge. In anticipation of the solstice a new group of people are coming to meet the stones. Many are coming from London, others from across the country, a small number from abroad. The British press struggles to represent them. They go with a sardonic-colonial-anthropological shade, as if they are reporting on a distant, far away tribe, unknown to us modern people. Many of the portraits of these early festival goers are caustic – after all the hippies had been in circulation for a couple of decades by this point, and this derisive tone is almost the middle ground between the desire to either vilify or save them.  Yet, by the mid-seventies, as festivals are becoming bigger events, hippies are no longer the only type of people expected to turn up, and so the media either distinguishes the new tribes from the hippies, or reinforces the well-known laid-back, drug-taking image. Here are a few of these exoticized portraits:

‘He lives for most of the time with his wife Jill, and daughter Alice, aged three, with other Tipi people on a 40 acres farm in South Wales, owned by one of their number. They feed themselves as far as possible from the produce of the farm, make their own clothes, get light from candles and heat from logs built in the middle of the tent, which is so constructed that currents of air carry the smoke out through the top. “I am here for the solstice sun dance” he said. “Stonehenge is a very powerful spiritual centre.’ (‘Warning fails to deter pop enthusiasts at Stonehenge’ in Times, 19 June 1976).

‘The great Stonehenge Strip got under the way yesterday strictly against […] regulations. […] The hippies ignored the ban and rolled up to pitch their tents near the ancient stones above. As you can see (referring to nudity in the adjoining pictures) many didn’t wait for Sunday morning’s druid ceremonies to get in a bit of sun worshiping.’ (‘Rock Bottom!’ Daily Mirror, 19 June 1976).

‘The hippies claim that the ancient stones and the sun are of spiritual significance to them and that the midsummer solstice is a holy date to them’ (‘Festival goes pop – but quietly’, Southern Evening Echo, 19 June 76).

This was the new stage of a revival of the solstice into a new spiritual Contemporary Pagan tradition. But what is the meaning of the highest point in summer in the context of global heating? What is becoming of the festival celebrations of the summer solstice in the Anthropocene? My own research with climate activists, who often draw on Pagan spirituality, suggests that the voices of those who revived the summer solstice as a religious celebration in the 1960s and 1970s are now changing. The stories of the solstice are drying out. We hear instead the otherworldly silent cries of strange future beings – the Red Rebels of Extinction Rebellion marches. This is not a loss – but a transformation – of tradition.

Many scholars have claimed that increased mobility and globalisation in our contemporary world is impacting on the established channels for cultural transmission, leading to increased secularisation and a loss in traditional cultural values. Others have shown that the transmission of religious and other cultural elements may continue despite decline or disruptions in such institutions as the church, communities of place, the traditional family and so on.   We increasingly live in a world dominated by change, uncertainty and risk, and scholars recognised that the implications of living with unprecedented global risk in a detraditionalised society involve the development of new types of subversive movements. (Macnaughton and Urry,1998: 70) Summer festivals developed in this context and against such global trends, during the past five or six decades. And they often had the solstice as a distinct focus.

It is true that over the past five to six decades, festival networks have developed a model drawn from the memorialisation of the free festivals of the 1960. Woodstock’s and Glastonbury’s iconic naked festival bodies were displaying a nostalgic re-enactment of and yearning for a simpler past and community. Especially in the UK, given the links with Stonehenge, the solstice provided a focus for this spiritual revival. But in recent years, transnational festival networks, like the Burning Man festival, have consciously promoted novel and subversive community-oriented spiritual practices.  Modern festivals’ tribal aesthetic may suggest a return to tradition, but in fact many countercultural festivals with roots that go back to the 1960s have acted as acculturative hubs, helping us to make sense of climate change, experiment with surviving in the arid heat of the Nevada desert, and develop an eco-conscious community spirituality (Pike, 2005).

In the context of my own work on festivals and protestivals connected to the British climate movement I have argued that modern festivals, often like the pilgrimage sites of the ancient and pre-modern word, are platforms for innovation, change and acculturation (Nita, 2022). The solstice revival was always culturally subversive, and I would argue it was always making space for cultural change. And never was cultural change more urgently needed than the Anthropocene.

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By Dr Maria Nita  

Although we are often told that late modernity is self-reflexive, and grounded in self-examination this reflexivity has been critiqued from many quarters for its “ouroboric” tendencies, or for not being grounded in social practice.¹ It is as though, with the advent of what Peter Berger called the ‘shrinkage’ of the sacred, or Max Weber called ‘disenchantment’, there were fewer and fewer vistas for sustained collective reflection—‘Sorry folks, all we have left is this small bottle of individual self-exploration leading to an intoxicating search for self-identity. It may look small, but it is bottomless…’ No wonder that only something as collectively sobering as the climate crisis could bring about the new ‘elusive virtue’ of ecological reflexivity, with its components of  ‘recognition, rethinking and response’ (Pickering 2019), or as Extinction Rebellion encapsulates it: ‘Act Now’. 

The 2018 reboot of the climate movement, Extinction Rebellion (XR), seems to have already accomplished the impossible by carrying through elements from the long 1960s transatlantic counterculture, to green millennials. When XR activists talk about REGEN—the regenerative culture project at the heart of XR—you can hear reverberated echoes of the alternative communes and free festivals, which seemed to have either become distant history or, may have been gestating inside new global transformative festivals (St John 2022; van den Ende 2022). Art and performance festivals had indeed preserved elements of the counterculture, but the protest spirit of the 1960s hippie culture had entered a dormant, performative, and memorialized phase (Nita and Gemie 2020). Sure, the so-called ‘long 1960s’ culture might be remembered and celebrated for two short weeks at Glastonbury or Burning Man, but could a new generation be living it out? 

REGEN (short for ‘regenerative culture’) recaptures the ethos of civil disobedience, artistic activism, and communalism of the early hippie communes which were anticipating and preparing themselves for a future world in deep crisis (Miller 1999). Take for example the four-minute clip below where an XR activist explains this new culture in the making. She describes REGEN as ‘the mycelium upon which XR relies for its nurturing a new society that is resilient and robust and can support us all through the changes we must inevitably face together’. REGEN helps us ‘reweave ourselves as part of a living eco-system’ through climate mindfulness, expressing grief, learning resilience, and experimenting with new types of self-care and communication practices—like ‘listening circles’, gatherings where people listen without directly responding to each other. Surely, these are practices of eco-reflexivity—but where are they coming from?  

XR Regen Culture Explained | April Griefsong | March 2019 | Extinction Rebellion UK – YouTube 

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