Human rights workshop: LGBTQ+ activism and memorialisation
Workshop
Event date
Tuesday 2 June 2026, 10.30am to 4.30pm
Location
In-person only
H/G15
H/G15
Booking
Booking required
Event details
Email Ruth Kelly (ruth.kelly@york.ac.uk) to register
The workshop will include the following interventions:
- Reflection from practice from current CAHR fellow working on trans rights
David Kato was a Ugandan human rights defender and gay rights activist who had a significant impact on the rights of LGBTQ+ people in Uganda. The discussion will focus on ongoing struggles for LGBTQ+ rights across Africa.
- Discussion of Alasia Nuti’s monograph on LGBTQ+ rights and ‘thanatoactivism’ – activism for present-day justice that is significantly centred on the dead (discussants: Kerri Woods and Laura Forster)
Is there anything wrong in using the dead for the sake of the living? The question points to dilemmas facing “thanatoactivism” — activism that reinstates the dead into politics. Focusing on LGBTQ+ struggles, this project will develop a framework helping us to navigate our conflicting intuitions about activism in the name of the dead, for the sake of the living. What political work is it legitimate to ask the dead to do? When does it translate into their instrumentalization and exploitation? These are the two main questions the project aims to answer.
- Discussion of Tom Houlton’s edited volume World LGBTQIA2S+ Memorialisation and Remembrance in the 21st Century (with Martin Zebracki; discussant: Megan Robertson)
LGBTQIA2S+ public memorialisation and remembrance have become an increasingly visible and contested part of public debate throughout the 21st century. At the sharp end of the “new culture wars”, memorial and remembrance projects engaging with queer subjects or themes often find themselves at the forefront of the ongoing question of who or what should be commemorated in our public spaces, and how. As such, memorialisation across the world is witnessing a re-configuring of its frameworks, with nation-states and their opposing counter-narratives in a sometimes bitterlycontested dialogue. Intersecting with narratives of race, colonialism, gender, activism, resistance, epidemics, ecology, futurity and technology, LGBTQIA2S+ memorials bear witness to intersecting legacies of politics, trauma, commemoration, and community. This edited collection seeks to examine how the first twenty-five years of the 21st century have brought increasing visibility and representation to LGBTQIA2S+ communities, their memorials and remembrance practices. This publication seeks to record and examine the practical and theoretical concerns facing LGBTQIA2S+ memorials and remembrance projects at this quarter-century moment: to examine the past and consider the future across a wide range of global memorial and remembrance projects.
- Reflection from practice from current CAHR fellow working on trans rights
David Kato was a Ugandan human rights defender and gay rights activist who had a significant impact on the rights of LGBTQ+ people in Uganda. The discussion will focus on ongoing struggles for LGBTQ+ rights across Africa.
- Discussion of Alasia Nuti’s monograph on LGBTQ+ rights and ‘thanatoactivism’ – activism for present-day justice that is significantly centred on the dead (discussants: Kerri Woods and Laura Forster)
Is there anything wrong in using the dead for the sake of the living? The question points to dilemmas facing “thanatoactivism” — activism that reinstates the dead into politics. Focusing on LGBTQ+ struggles, this project will develop a framework helping us to navigate our conflicting intuitions about activism in the name of the dead, for the sake of the living. What political work is it legitimate to ask the dead to do? When does it translate into their instrumentalization and exploitation? These are the two main questions the project aims to answer.
- Discussion of Tom Houlton’s edited volume World LGBTQIA2S+ Memorialisation and Remembrance in the 21st Century (with Martin Zebracki; discussant: Megan Robertson)
LGBTQIA2S+ public memorialisation and remembrance have become an increasingly visible and contested part of public debate throughout the 21st century. At the sharp end of the “new culture wars”, memorial and remembrance projects engaging with queer subjects or themes often find themselves at the forefront of the ongoing question of who or what should be commemorated in our public spaces, and how. As such, memorialisation across the world is witnessing a re-configuring of its frameworks, with nation-states and their opposing counter-narratives in a sometimes bitterlycontested dialogue. Intersecting with narratives of race, colonialism, gender, activism, resistance, epidemics, ecology, futurity and technology, LGBTQIA2S+ memorials bear witness to intersecting legacies of politics, trauma, commemoration, and community. This edited collection seeks to examine how the first twenty-five years of the 21st century have brought increasing visibility and representation to LGBTQIA2S+ communities, their memorials and remembrance practices. This publication seeks to record and examine the practical and theoretical concerns facing LGBTQIA2S+ memorials and remembrance projects at this quarter-century moment: to examine the past and consider the future across a wide range of global memorial and remembrance projects.