Month: January 2021

ACTIVISM & MUTUAL AID IN THE PANDEMIC

ONLINE MEETING
THURSDAY 11 FEBRUARY 6:30PM-8:30PM (GMT)

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 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.

THURSDAY 28 JANUARY – 6:30pm-8:30pm

Online Meeting

ACTIVISTS

Benjamin Morgan, Public Interest Law Centre. PILC exists to challenge injustice through legal representation, strategic litigation, research and legal education. In 2017, PILC worked with North East London Migrant Action (Nelma) to bring a successful case against data sharing between homelessness charities and Immigration enforcement towards the removal of migrant rough sleepers. PILC is currently preparing a legal challenge to the new Immigration Rule that makes rough sleeping itself grounds for removal. 

The No Evictions Network started in Summer 2018 to organise neighbourhoods in Glasgow against the mass eviction of asylum seekers from SERCO-run accommodation across the city. The campaign culminated in Serco losing their contract in Scotland, but being replaced by a new company: Mears. Throughout the lockdown this year the Network supported people evicted from asylum accommodation and rehoused, or detained, in hotels – whilst also campaigning against the horrendous conditions people faced.

The OUR HOMES Renters Research Project is a Participatory Action Research Project started by the Hackney Branch of the London Renters Union. In summer 2019, a group of renters were employed by the union to research their own and their wider community’s housing situations. Together they collectively made a film “Hostile Housing” which asks what the problems are, who is responsible and what we need to do to make change.

HISTORIANS 

Amy Grant is a PhD candidate at University of East Anglia. Amy researches the state, racism, hate and the church in late 20th century Britain, through the lens of squatting, sanctuary campaigns and anti-deportation resistance between the 1970s and 1990s.

Dr Becky Taylor is a historian who is centrally concerned with the relationship between the different levels of the state and marginal and minority groups. Her areas of research and writing have taken in histories of Gypsy, Roma and Travellers, ‘immigrants’, those living in poverty, and most recently, refugees. She is currently writing a book for Cambridge University Press called The Britain they Entered: Refugees to Britain in the Twentieth Century. Her understanding of the state is also informed by over two decades of involvement in direct action as part of various grass-roots environmental, peace and social justice movements.