History Acts 27
LGBTIQ+ resilience: Activism & mutual aid in the pandemic
Thursday 11 February 6:30-8:30pm. To register visit www.historyacts.org
ACTIVISTS
Carla Ecola, Director, The Outside Project, the UK’s first LGBTIQ+ Crisis/Homeless Shelter & Community Centre. We are LGBTIQ+ colleagues, friends & activists who work in the Homeless sector & have lived experience of homelessness & the unique, complex issues our community face.
Nadia, Bent Bars Project. The Bent Bars Project is a letter-writing project for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, gender-variant, intersex, and queer prisoners in Britain. The project was founded in 2009, responding to a clear need to develop stronger connections and build solidarity between LGBTQ communities inside and outside prison walls. The project is run by a small volunteer collective who meet weekly (currently online), of which Nadia has been a member of since 2015.
HISTORIANS
Ralph Day is a doctoral researcher and tutor in contemporary history at Birkbeck. His current research focuses on the telephone information and support service London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard.
Queer Pandemic: Resilience in Times of Crisis is a video-based oral history project to collect stories about the experiences of LGBTQ+ people in the UK in the era of COVID-19. Queer Pandemic is an international collaboration between: Queer Britain; Goldsmiths, University of London; and Kent State University. Molly Merryman, research director for Queer Britain and the director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at Kent State University, will be representing the project on the panel.
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History Acts workshops are led by activists, who give a short talk or presentation about their work. A historian or historians working on a relevant topic will then respond, before opening it up to group discussion.
History Acts is a radical history forum, affiliated to the Raphael Samuel Centre, and based at the Institute of Historical Research.
We bring together radical and left-wing historians and contemporary activists. We seek new ways to engage as academics with contemporary struggles, to learn from activists, and to see how we can use what expertise and institutional resources we have to provide active solidarity.
Sessions are free and open to any historian, any history student, or anyone interested in how history can work for social and political change.