Colin Barker & Laurence Cox

Colin Barker (b. 1939) is a British sociologist as well as a Marxist historian and writer. A long-standing member of the Socialist Workers Party in Manchester, he is the author of numerous articles and works on Marxism, including a history of the Polish trade union Solidarity, Festival of the Oppressed.
A Trotskyist, Barker was a member of the International Socialism Group in Oxford and Manchester from 1962. He was a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University from 1967 to 2002.

Laurence Cox (Dublin / Maynooth) grew up with social movements and has been actively involved ever since, in a wide range of different movements and countries and at many different levels: from alternative press editor to co-founding movement networks, from running mailing lists to stuffing envelopes and from summit protest spokesperson to creating alternative kindergartens. Over the years he has been particularly committed to building links between social movements in Ireland, to dialogue between anti-capitalist activists and working-class community organisers, and to movement media and education. He has been an academic, busker, meditation teacher, father, party activist (in a previous century), blogger, translator and (failed) dishwasher. Cox has published widely on the "movement of movements", working-class community organising, social movement cultures, activist theorising and new religious movements.