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Sophia Kier-Byfield: Reading Together/ Acting Together

 

FOR PAULO FREIRE AND BELL HOOKS, EDUCATION IS “THE PRACTICE OF FREEDOM”. READING AND WRITING CAN TRANSFORM OUR VIEWS ON THE WORLD AND MAKE US CRITICAL OF POWER STRUCTURES. THINKING DIFFERENTLY LEADS TO ACTING DIFFERENTLY!

The Århus Feminist Reading Group has been active in Denmark since May 2017. It was set up after the global women’s protests of January that year to create non-academic spaces for sustained dialogue and community building. We wanted to start reflecting on those moments of local rupture that puncture Denmark’s glossy self-image and connect these experiences and disquiets to persistent kinds of discrimination and inequalities globally. Monthly meetings on topics from veganism to Iranian graphic novels continue alongside film screenings, writing workshops and talks by women who have come to Denmark from elsewhere. We have heard personal accounts of bride kidnapping in Kazakhstan, illegal abortion in Ireland and harassment in Egypt; watched films about hair waxing in Palestine; and we have written manifestos together.

Our ongoing moments of intimacy and openness resist narratives of individualism as well as the specific inequalities and injustices concerning gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, ability and the environment that the meetings address. Reading and listening together are acts of solidarity!

 

 

Pissed off citizen Kier-Byfield
Pissed off citizen Kier-Byfield is a PhD student at the Centre for Doctoral Training: Feminism, Sexual Politics and Visual Culture, based at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on feminist pedagogies for the humanities in contemporary higher education. She is an angry dual national of the UK and Denmark, two countries that regularly commit crimes against human and non-human rights and deny citizenship to those who need it most.

 

 

Response: “[Re-]Imagining the Family: Forms, Values, Planning and Alternatives” Reading Groups

Two reading group sessions organised by Sophia Kier-Byfield, Tom Nys and Altea Solari at Palazzo Mora, Venice, 7 and 8 November 2019. For more information see here.

 

 

 

Response: “[Re-]Imagining the Family: Forms, Values, Planning and Alternatives” Reading Group in Loughborough

A follow-up reading group session organised by Sophia Kier-Byfield and Tom Nys, Loughborough University, 12 February 2020. For more information see here.