Bookselling as Resistance

Conference combined with the annual meeting of the Bookselling Research Network (BRN)

Book historical work has been increasingly highlighting books - their publication, distribution and reception - in intersectional activist contexts, shining light on interconnections between community-building, politics and the book. In our conference, scheduled for September 2025 in Münster, Germany, we plan to hone in on bookselling as a practice and consider the ways in which resistance can be interpreted vis-à-vis bookselling and bookstores. As Kimberley Kinder has shown, bookstores - and booksellers - play a central role in social activism and for “activist placemaking” (Kinder 2021). In the wake of the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016, independent bookstores received heightened media attention for offering readers and community members spaces to exchange ideas and organize, with the stores “taking on roles ranging from meeting place to political war room” (Bosman 2017). Adjacently, feminist bookstores experienced a resurgence after the 2016 US election (Kirch 2018). Doyle Highland has considered “how the material space of bookstores shapes social engagement [...] and cultural values” (2023), and recent work by Dhingra (2024) and Srinivasan (forthcoming, 2025) puts pressure on these concepts from an Indian perspective. Internationally, independent bookselling per se has come to be understood as a mode of resistance against Amazon’s market dominance and destructive human and ecological (Caine 2021). Beyond these examples, our conference invites delegates to explore the theme of bookselling - past and present - as resistance.

Weitere Infos zur Veranstaltung