Day 1: Wednesday 14th June
Please do not sign up to more than one workshop within a single time slot as spaces are allocated based on room capacity.
Breaks will take place between 3-4pm and 6-7pm on each day of the Festival.
Further information about our workshop facilitators can be found via the Eventbrite link to their workshop.
Workshop 1 (1-3pm)
1.1 Podcasting 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Podcasting for Social Justice
Facilitated by: Kyra Araneta (University of Westminster)
Do you listen to podcasts? Have you ever thought about making your own but didn’t know where to start? What about using podcasting as a tool for social justice?
The Pedagogies for Social Justice is an educational podcast that features interviews with activists, academics and students from universities across the UK and internationally on topics related to decoloniality and anti-racism.
Join us for this workshop which will teach you everything you need to know about creating your own podcast. Designed for students, academics, and anyone who is passionate about using podcasting as a way to promote social change, we’ll cover everything from the basics of podcasting from the comfort of your own home to more advanced topics like editing and distribution. We’ll even help you to begin to brainstorm and design your own!
Once you’ve learnt the logistics, we’ll explore the role of storytelling in podcasting and the potential it holds for generating socially-just atmospheres. Drawing from Indigenous epistemologies and intersectional feminist approaches, we will consider the ways storytelling is theorised and practised, and how we might begin to adopt such a method within our own thinking and action in the community. Overall, we offer this workshop as a starting point for those interested in learning about story as a practice and why it must centre our positionalities, challenge hierarchies, nurture our relationships, and support radical dreaming if we want to enact positive change.
1.2 Kicking down doors: closets, disciplines and the university
Facilitated by: Jo Krishnakumar (SOAS, University of London)
How will we decolonise if we are decolonising in English? When our aesthetic choices attached to decolonising projects come from our colonial trauma? When everything we do is in the language of and aspiring to the coloniser?
This workshop connects anthropological, trans-queer and activist methodologies to question ‘where we know from’ (Zuroski, 2020) through an conversations and an activity on ‘closets’. We will think through borders (only to question them) of identity closets, the university, and larger borders between disciplines and nation states.
The participants will engage with a decolonial deconstruction of the idea of the ‘closet’ through Almaarii, a visual ethnographic project on closets of Queer South Asian people. They will think through the idea of their identity closets before the information they received and post the information they have about their identities to then explore queer pasts, presents and futures. These identity closets are a grounding metaphor for the ideas and language we learn and are often tied to that makes decolonisation a difficult process. Through the closets and questioning what we know of the self, we will question what we know about everything around us (from closets to the university, to knowledge, to nations).
The workshop is open to anyone and everyone who would like to think around borders and boundaries but is an explicitly anti-caste, POC, queer, trans, sex worker-inclusive space.
1.3 #SewingForJustice
Facilitated by: The Grenfell Memorial Quilt Community Fabric Art project (GMQ) and Lynn Setterington (Manchester Metropolitan University)
GMQ is a polymorphous art WIP made up of donated preloved fabrics, with all the trimmings.
The aim is to represent the fabric of our communities. Sewing & quilting combining crafts using donated fabrics & materials different levels of skillsets. Designs , patterns & techniques.
The idea is to create a fabric wall quilt hanging. A 220ft (height of Grenfell Tower) Memorial, protest Fabric Art piece.
Using the American ‘Jellyroll ‘technique (strips of multi-coloured fabrics) for the background to replicate the walls that organically turned into vigil sites around Grenfell Tower they were adorned with commerative, celebrational, dedications tribute pieces, items of clothing, t-shirts-i.e. Football shirts, poetry, written word, song lyrics, activism messages & teddy bears, ribbons, garlands, flowers, plants, religious artefacts & tokens of love & support. GMQ is symbolises the many blended, interwoven threads of our lives, that create the multi -faceted, cultural, economical, interfaith layers that shape the fabric of our communities.
Workshop 2 (4-6pm)
2.1 The synergies between theories of womanism, decolonial feminism and intersectionality: reimagining sustainable futures for women empowerment
Facilitated by: The Decolonisation and Anti-Racism (DAR) study group
The “DAR” study group is your modern-day book club that aims to foster the learning and dialogue that is needed in any effort towards social justice in higher education. We offer a space that facilitates the analysis and discussion of texts, media and news, in the hope that you will join us as we call these into question, reflect on our own ideas and practices, and stretch our understandings beyond the colonial and racist confines of the academy. The study group is brought to you by the Pedagogies for Social justice project, which is a student-staff partnership at the University of Westminster.
This workshop is dedicated to exploring the synergies between theories of womanism, decolonial feminism and intersectionality as a means of generating sustainable futures rooted in women empowerment. We explore these synergies by reflecting on their core principles, identifying where ideas overlap and the implications for our understanding of the lived experiences of all women.
Womanism typically refers to the theories of feminists of colour, in particular their contributions to our understanding of gender and its relationship to other intersecting factors such as race, class, caste, and ability. For instance, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Intersectionality (1982) is a concept that describes the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, class and other forms of discrimination “intersect” to create unique dynamics and modes of disadvantage. Mainstream feminism is often criticised for neglecting the specificities of women’s experiences and creating assumptions based on a female subject that is straight, white, middle-class, and nondisabled (Christoffersen and Emejulu, 2022). Decolonial feminism grapples with these issues in feminist debates today in particular, a feminist universalism that tends to reinforce Western concepts of gender — which were originally forced on people of colour through historical and continued colonialism (Lugones, 2010).
The aim of this workshop is to help you understand the foundations of these theories in order to engage in discussions and generate sustainable futures rooted in womanist, decolonial and intersectional feminist principles.
2.2 Towards Liberatory Futures
Facilitated by: Drea Asibey (Cultural Producer, Curator and Educator)
This workshop aims to examine and explore radical imagination, decoloniality and healing as a call to arms that will destroy the systems and structures of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism to name a few. Through the session we will look at mobilising vs organising, creating communities of solidarity, action & care and embedding love into activism.
“Another world is possible, we just have to be brave enough to imagine it.” – Dominique Palmer
Evening session (7-8:30pm)
Book Launch: Frequently Asked White Questions by Ajay Parasram and Alex Khasnabish
Are you a white person with questions about how race affects different situations, but you feel awkward, shy, or afraid to ask the people of colour in your life? Are you a racialized person who is tired of answering the same questions over and over?
Join us for the launch of Frequently Asked White Questions, where Alex Khasnabish and Ajay Parasram answer ten of the most common questions asked of them by people seeking to understand how race structures our every day. Drawing from their lived experiences as well as live sessions of their monthly YouTube series Safe Space for White Questions, the authors offer concise, accessible answers to questions about race, racism, and social justice. Join us for a lively evening featuring the authors, special invited guests, and lots of time for your questions about race, racism, and the struggle for collective liberation.