Oxbridge Feminism in Theory and in Action Conference

Times Session 1 Session 2 Activities Conference Opens (11am) 11am – A Feminist Media Portrayal? Decolonisation: What should this look 12pm like? With Shaista Aziz (journalist at ), Micha Frazer- With Melz Owusu (University of Leeds, Caroll (editor at Gal-Dem and previously on TEDTalks), Dr Denise Noble CUSU Welfare and Rights (Birmingham City University) and Rianna Officer), and Sydney Heifler (MSt Walcott (Project Myopia, PHD researcher student) at King’s College London)

Chaired by Catherine Kelly 12 – 1pm: LUNCH 1:15 – Histories of the Feminist Fighting for Migrants Rights 2pm Movement With Annie Gavrilescu (Help Refugees), With Dr Charlie Jeffries Paul Otswald ( Journal for (Lecturer in 20th Century Interrupted Studies) and Christopher Smart History, Keble College), Dr (Oxford Students’ Refugee Campaign) Charlotte Riley (University of Southampton) and Professor Chaired by Margo Munroe-Kerr Patricia Daley (Fellow and Tutor in Geography at Jesus College, Assessor in 2015/6 and author of Race Equality Report) Craftivism Chaired by Niamh White (co- chair of Women’s’ Campaign) BREAK 2:15 – National Organising Grassroots Organising against 3pm Austerity With NUS Womens’ Campaign and Laura Argyropulo Coryton Workshop with Sisters Uncut BREAK 3:15 – Why We Need to Care Trans Activism and Care 4pm about Climate Justice? With Jack Doyle (DPhil and member of With Annie Pickering (People & Action for Trans Health), Santina Sorrenti Planet), Oxford SU’s Climate (MSt and founder of G(end)er Swap) and Dr Justice Society and Suzanne Clara Barker (Vice-Chair of LGBTQ+ Dhaliwal (founder of Tar Sands Advisory Group) Network and indigenous rights campaigner) Chaired by Dan Orr (co-chair of Women’s’ Campaign) Chaired by Farheen Ahmed

Plenary remarks and Close of Conference

Oxbridge Feminism in Theory and in Action Conference

Speaker Biographies

Shaista Aziz is a Journalist and writer, with work in The Guardian, Globe and Mail, New York Times and BBC. She’s the founder of The Everyday Bigotry Project seeking to disrupt narratives around race and bigotry. She's a former aid worker of 15 years and has worked across the Middle East, East and West Africa and with women impacted by conflict and emergencies. She's the co-founder of Intersectional Feminist Foreign Policy seeking to influence the creation of an ethical feminist foreign policy that does no further harm to women and girls and that brings the lived experiences and expertise of women excluded from policy discussions based on their intersectional identities.

Dr Clara Barker works in the Department of Materials, managing the Centre for Applied Superconductivity. Clara also happens to be transgender. During her youth there were few LGBT+ role models around, continuing through her STEM career. Clara is a loud advocate for LGBT+ diversity in STEM and for LGBT+ equality in the university (as an LGBT+ model) and in the local community (through running local support groups). Her work was most recently recognised by the Prime Minster being awarded the prestigious Point of Light Award and was recently featured in Stonewall’s work on Trans Day of Visibility.

Laura Argyropulo Coryton runs the UK 'End Tampon Tax' campaign with over 320,000 supporters, sits on the BBC's '100 Women' steering committee and currently studies MSt Women's Studies at the University of Oxford.

Micha Frazer-Caroll is the current Welfare and Rights Officer at Cambridge Students’ Union and has recently worked on a successful ‘Welfare is Political’ campaign. Micha is also the Arts and Culture Editor at gal-dem magazine.

Professor Patricia Daley is Professor of the Human Geography of Africa and the Helen Morag Fellow and Geography Tutor at Jesus College, Oxford. She served as the University Assessor for 2015 - 2016. She is a pan-African-Feminist/Womanist and is the author of Gender and Genocide: The Search for Spaces of Peace in central Africa. Professor Daley was awarded the Outstanding Supervisor Award by the Oxford University Student Union in 2015.

Suzanne Dhaliwal is an activist and campaigner, working on indigenous rights and mining issues. Suzanne is the director and co-founder of the UK Tar Sands Network, which works in solidarity with the Indigenous Environmental network to campaign against UK corporations and financial institutions invested in the Alberta Tar Sands. She has worked with Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders Canada raising awareness about the impacts of mining on the mental health of indigenous communities impacted by mining in Colombia. She has been connecting environmental justice struggles in the Arctic, Tar Sands and Nigeria specifically around Shell’s human rights violations. Since 2011 she has developed anti-oppression and creative action trainings to support the development of a creative inclusive environmental movement grounded in anti-oppression principles.

Annie Gavrilescu is currently the France regional manager for Help Refugees, and has worked in Northern France since September 2015. The work of Help Refugees in the region has been mainly to provide emergency aid to displaced people in camps, and now on the streets and in the woods of Calais and Grande Synthe, from over 10,000 in the old Jungle camp, to now around 1000 across the area. Apart from emergency aid (including shelter, food, clothing and hygiene) to 70 grassroots projects in France, Serbia, Greece and as far as Syria, Help Refugees have prioritised advocating for long term change by litigating against and holding governments to account on issues such as child protection, sanitation, police violence and many other state failures

Anna Gee is a first year undergraduate studying Biological Sciences, and have been exposed to some of the fascinating research my tutors and lecturers are doing in the area of climate change. As such, I was shocked by the hypocrisy when it was revealed in the Paradise Papers leak that Oxford University

Oxbridge Feminism in Theory and in Action Conference has investments in fossil fuel exploration ventures. This prompted me to join the Climate Justice Campaign and put pressure on the University and Colleges to withdraw these investments. Our campaign aims to raise awareness among the student body, and start a dialogue with the University. We also led two direct actions last term, one of which involved being covered in fake oil to tell Oxford to #ComeClean.

Sydney Heifler is a comic book and media historian, who specializes in romance comic books and magazines created during the Cold War in both United States and the United Kingdom. She is a Regent’s Scholar and a Provost Undergraduate Fellow of UC Davis. Currently, she is pursuing her MSt in Women’s Studies at the University of Oxford.

Dr Charlie Jeffries is a Lecturer in 20th Century History at Keble College, Oxford. Prior to this, she was a pre-doctoral Fellow at Yale, a PhD student at Cambridge, and before that a Teaching Fellow in History at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh. At Cambridge, she was highly involved in the community and activism of the CUSU women's campaign, particularly in the drive for consent workshops to be brought in across the colleges. She researches gender, sexuality, and social movements in the modern US, and she is currently preparing a book manuscript on the significance of adolescent sexuality in the US culture wars. She also makes queer feminist punk pop under the name Jeff.

Melz is an Academic, Grime MC/ Rapper and Poet. They are passionate about decolonising knowledge and spaces and writes extensively about this in her music, poetry and academic work. Melz has worked with platforms such as TEDx and The Huffington Post where they offer poetic and musical responses to some of the most critical issues facing our society and political system. Melz is currently pursuing a PhD at The University of Leeds wherein they are exploring the epistemic ways Eurocentric colonialism continues to affect black British mental health.

Margo Munroe-Kerr worked for the Unofficial Women and Children's Centre in the Calais Jungle as a translator and teacher for two months before it was evicted in October 2016, and in the Dunkirk Refugee Women's Centre in August 2017. She has been working with Asylum Welcome visiting and supporting detainees in Campsfield House since March 2017 and also runs Oxford for Dunkirk, a group aiming to raise funds for efforts on the ground in refugee camps in Northern France and encourage students to volunteer.

Dr Denise Noble has taught media, cultural studies, sociology, African American and African Studies and social work in the UK and USA. In addition to her academic career Denise has extensive experience of community activism and community work, and is an experienced professional and personal development consultant and trainer, specialising in equality and diversity in further and higher education as well as coaching and mentoring. Denise’s research interests include race and racism in the UK; the Caribbean diaspora; the intersections of place, race, gender, class and sexuality in the cultural politics of the African diaspora; the cultural politics of Black freedom; postcolonial media practices; and post-coloniality / decoloniality / modernity.

Paul Otswald is the founding editor-in-chief of the Oxford Journal of Interrupted Studies. The Journal of Interrupted Studies (www.jis-oxford.co.uk) is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes complete and incomplete articles by academics, researchers, students and scholars whose work was interrupted by forced migration. Paul recently graduated from the University of Oxford, with a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

Annie Pickering currently works as Campaigns & Movement Building Coordinator at People & Planet, mainly supporting student groups running our Sweatshop Free Campaign on workers' rights in the electronics industry. I am also a member of UK Youth Climate Coalition who organise youth delegations to the United Nations climate change talks every year and previously successfully got the University of Sussex to divest from Fossil Fuels whilst being involved in climate campaigns at University.

Oxbridge Feminism in Theory and in Action Conference

Charlotte Lydia Riley is a lecturer in twentieth century British history at the University of Southampton. She is interested in the history of British decolonisation, overseas aid and the end of empire, and British political culture, with a particular focus on gender politics. She is on as @lottelydia.

Santina Sorrenti is the founder of G(end)er Swap, a London based outreach initiative that supports transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming individuals to access clothes in a safe space. Santina has worked as a mental health and support worker with a harm reduction NGO in Vancouver, Canada, primarily in LGBTQI+ social housing projects. Santina has also volunteered at Vancouver Women’s Rape Relief Shelter and the Vancouver Health Collective that allows marginalised women* to access sexual health services and resources. Santina holds a BA (Hons) in International Studies (Leiden University, Netherlands) and is currently an M.St candidate in Women’s Studies at University of Oxford, Regent’s Park College. Their current research focuses on feminist and queer theory and the impact of technology on queer identity, the representation of gender diverse identities online through aesthetics and visual culture as well as posthumanist, semifinalist and postcapitalist discourse. Santina is also a member of the Queer Studies Network affiliated with the TORCH Centre for Humanities at Oxford and the Graduate Representative for Oxford SU Women’s Campaign.

Rianna Walcott is a PhD candidate at Kings College London researching black identity formation in digital spaces, and a graduate from the University of Edinburgh. She co-founded Project Myopia http://projectmyopia.com/, a website that promotes diversity in academia and a decolonised curriculum. She frequently writes about feminism, race and literature for publications including gal- dem, The Skinny, and The Guardian. Rianna is associate editor for upcoming anthology The Colour of Madness, and, in the time she has left over, moonlights as a professional jazz singer.

For concerns throughout the day, you can find Farheen Ahmed (Oxford SU VP Welfare and Equal Opportunities), or call 07930895847.

Collections are running throughout the day for the #USSStrike, find out more about how to show solidarity with striking University Staff through the Oxford SU website.