Workshop: Bridging Activism and Research

The #AfterMarriage conference aims to help foster connections between activists and scholars, and we’re especially excited about the workshop planned by two editors of the recent anthology, Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism. The workshop will help attendees learn how academics and activists can collaborate on research projects, so bring your ideas! This session is scheduled for Saturday 10/1 at 2:30 pm.

Workshop leaders Salvador Vidal-Ortiz and Letitia Gomez write:

“In this workshop-style panel, we will engage with the foundational feminist, queer, and racial justice roots of the book Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism (Quesada, Gomez & Vidal-Ortiz, University of Texas Press 2015), which discusses LGBT activists in community organizations in the 1970s throughout the 1990s in the U.S./Puerto Rico. The book’s project, from inception to publishing, has been to show, through an illustration of how the oral histories and archival documents are more than simply personal accounts (or an N=1), a clear path to a small version of the social movement activism networks of the era. In recounting the past, conducting research by activists, academics, and academic-activists, and publishing it, Queer Brown Voices aims to signal to the potentiality of similar project possibilities for current and future generations…

This interactive session will help attendees understand the potential of collaborations between community activists and academics in developing research projects with specific aims. Participants are encouraged to come with an idea for a project. Presenters will share various alternative projects; there will also be sharing of handouts: a list of archives, info on the Oral History Association, how to navigate the Institutional Review Board at universities, etc. The main purpose is to see how a collaborative project with activists-academic partners results in a compilation of recent history for communities that are either made invisible, or underserved.”