Monday 17 June 2019 | 9.30 – 17.30 | Phoenix Centre, Brighton
City in its brute and concrete form is unliveable and unbearable. The physical structure is grand and overwhelming. While with the anonymity of the city comes a possibility to become anybody, distancing from pasts and writing of new histories; this anonymity is not for everyone, the city is not for everybody.
For queers of all kinds – the migrants, the homeless, gendered and racialized bodies, the lower castes and the poor, the gays and the likes, we redraw city maps through our everyday spatial practices. These maps are emotional. They contain hurt, pleasure, trauma, happiness, violence, dreams, inscribed onto various places that mark the city — our city, many cities. These are ephemeral. They do not survive for long. These maps are fictional. We produce them through our imaginations. The only way to survive a big city is to fictionalize it — make it our own – wrap it in our stories.
This one-day workshop as part of CHASE Feminist Networks’ small project grant attempts at exploring creative and critical ways of using ‘Walking’ and ‘Story-Telling’ as intersectional and interdisciplinary frames of doing queer-feminist research. It acknowledges that existing methodologies that build on flattening out differences for the sake of a neat analysis fail to capture the messiness of our subjectivities and geographies.
The workshop is led by Dr. Dhiren Borisa, a visiting fellow from Delhi, India whose work specialises in mapping queer geographies of cities, and often unseen cityscapes of lust, class and caste. Collaborating with Dhiren is Effie Makepeace, PhD student at the University of Sussex whose community theatre practice specialises in research methods which embody narrative and explores the maps we carry in our bodies. In the morning we will be introduced to their work, and experiment together as we move into a practical walking activity in the afternoon (please wear clothes and shoes you feel comfortable to move and walk in!)
We invite researchers, activists, academics and artists from across disciplines to come together, participate and co-think with us. Let us imagine together more creative ways of undoing these disciplinary frames that suggest us that that we shall never comfortably belong and work towards radical feminist and queer methodologies.
Registration
Please email effiemakepeace@hotmail.com or dhirenborisa6@gmail.com with a bit about yourself and your interest in applying. We would like to welcome people from all social locations and experiences and aim to be fully accessible, please let us know if you have any particular needs including dietary requirements. Please register by 12th June at the latest, spaces are limited.
Lunch will be provided. Those attending who are CHASE funded can apply for transport and childcare reimbursement. If you wish to attend but are not CHASE funded and these costs are a barrier, please contact us. This workshop is funded by the CHASE Feminist Network Small Projects Fund.
CHASE Feminist Network 