Partners

Glasgow Women’s Library: A Recognised Collection of National Significance, GWL is the sole Accredited Museum of women’s history in the UK. As well as being finalists for Art Fund Museum of the Year in 2018, GWL has a long track record of supporting artists to make ground-breaking work, informed by its rich collection and the diverse communities, both locally and globally, that contribute to its vision of a world in which every woman is able to fulfil her potential.

Living Rent: A mass-membership organization of low- and middle-income renters, Living Rent leads grassroots campaigns for housing rights, and lobbies for policy changes at council and government level.

Ubuntu Women Shelter: A Glasgow-based charity, Ubuntu provides short-term emergency accommodation needs for womxn (including non-binary, cis and trans women), and particularly for womxn of colour.

Team

Rachel Boyd is an upcoming graduate of the University of St Andrews’ MLitt in History of Photography (2021). Her research on photographer Margaret Fay Shaw (2019) was conducted in partnership with the Morton Photography Project at the National Trust for Scotland, where she volunteered as a Digitisation and Documentation Intern. Her thesis focuses on the intersection between photography and radio in expanding notions of community through mutual and embodied practices. She is acting as research assistant for Logie 100, a Dundee-based project celebrating the delayed centenary of Scotland’s first council housing, and for the Borders-based charity Streets Ahead. She approaches housing and its storied narratives from multiple vantage points, but with individual experience at its core.

Caroline Gausden is a writer and discursive curator based in Glasgow currently working as a development worker for Programming and Curating at Glasgow Women’s Library. Her research focus is on the convergence between radical, intersectional conceptions of hospitality, the archive and political art practices. Her PhD presented a practice based curatorial examination of the politics and poetics of the manifesto form, drawing feminist theoretical writing and activism alongside contemporary iterations of socially engaged art – including not least – Glasgow Women’s Library which is considered as an almost 30 year old social sculpture and living manifesto form.

Weitian Liu is a writer and researcher whose research and practice focus on the relationship between visual culture, contemporary art, everyday life, and politics. From 2018 to 2020, he undertook the Enlight Foundation Traineeship at the University of St Andrews where he completed an MPhil in History of Photography while cataloguing and researching the Franki Raffles Photography Collection at the University’s Special Collections. He is going to start his PhD studies in autumn 2021 in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he will investigate the modes of knowledge production pertaining to contemporary art in East Asia. With Ziyun Huang, he co-founded QILU Criticism, an independent online platform for critical discussions on contemporary art in mainland China.

Kirsten Lloyd is a lecturer in the School of Art History at the University of Edinburgh where she directs the MSc by Research in Collections and Curating Practices. Her research focuses on late 20th and 21st art and mediation, including lens-based practice, participatory work and realism. She is a Research Fellow with the ‘Feminism Art Maintenance’ (2019 – 2022) project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, and the Academic Lead for the University’s Contemporary Art Research Collection. Her chapter on the first iteration of Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here… (1989) appeared in Feminism and Art History Now (I.B. Tauris, 2017). She is currently working on a book called Contemporary Art and Capitalist Life and is an activist with Living Rent, Scotland’s tenant’s union (Leith branch).

Keira McLean is a stained-glass artist and WEA tutor from Glasgow. She is currently working on a commission for the Mayday Rooms celebrating Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie’s life and work. Over the past year she has developed and delivered a series of online visual journaling courses for the WEA. Stained glass community projects of note include the Govanhill Library Diversity Windows funded by the Commonwealth legacy fund. Keira is also a member of working-class art collective GAG who host interventions, self-publish and facilitate radical education workshops.

Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, based in Edinburgh. Her postdoctoral research addresses the politics, print cultures and poetics of LGBTQ, anti-colonial, feminist and Mad liberation movements in North America and Europe from the early 1970s onwards. Her current research also engages with transfeminism, social reproduction, critical race theory, contemporary poetics, socially engaged art and creative and critical writing. She is the author of three collections of poetry including of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018). Her creative and critical writing has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Poetry Review, MAP Magazine, The New Feminist Literary Studies (Cambridge UP, 2020), and Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021). With Fiona Anderson and Glyn Davis, she co-edited ‘Imagining Queer Europe Then and Now’, a special issue of Third Text journal (January 2021).

Joey Simons is a writer and WEA tutor from Glasgow. He is currently producing a publication and exhibition on the history of riots as part of Collective gallery’s Satellites programme, and has received funding from the Lipmann-Miliband Trust to create a digital archive of Glasgow housing struggles, with web designer Kate Lingard. As social historian-in-residence at Platform, he undertook extensive research into the radical history of Easterhouse, and edited the publication Let Us Act for Ourselves: Selected Works of Freddy Anderson. He has previously worked with GWL as co-curator (with Bechaela Walker) of Hitherto Unknown, a series of radical archive workshops centred around the work Tillie Olsen. He has also contributed essays and creative writing workshops for the Workers’ Stories project, and other writing has appeared in MAP Magazine, Gutter, and The Common Breath. He is an active member of the Living Rent tenants’ union.

Catherine Spencer is a lecturer in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews. Her research and teaching explore the relationships between art and since the late 1960s in Latin America, Europe and North America, with a particular focus on practices that use performance and abstraction. She is also interested in gender, sexuality, and histories of feminist practice. Her writing has been published in Art History, Art Journal, Oxford Art Journal, Tate Papers and Parallax. With Amy Tobin and Jo Applin she is co-editor of London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–1980 (Penn State 2018).