Celebrating our LGBTQ+ history (and future)

 

From queering the Science Museum’s digital collection to authoring a Trans Memoir and tackling biases in language translation, we mark LGBTQ+ history month with a tour of projects celebrating diversity and inclusion.

Hosted by the Queer Heritage Collections Network’s Dan Vo, who also founded the award-winning volunteer-led LGBTQ Tours at the V&A, Dan will be joined by guests from the Science Museum, Royal College of Art, the Goethe Institute and the wider world of science beyond Exhibition Road. Together they will present exciting projects and tell personal stories that focus on LGBTQ+ audiences, histories and research.

Speakers:

  • Laura Büllesbach and Rebecca Mellor are Assistant Curators on the Science Museum’s One Collection project. They are co-founders of its first Gender and Sexuality Network and are passionate about unearthing untold LGBTQ+ stories in the collections. In this talk, they will discuss the network’s aims and explore approaches to queering the Science Museum’s digital collections. Together, we will look at everything between Billy Dolls, sapphic violets, unicorn fire buckets and screws.
  • Juliet Jacques is a Visiting Lecturer in MA Contemporary Art Practice at the RCA, as well as a filmmaker, and author of Trans: A memoir, an account of transition and transgender politics and culture. Her latest book Variations explores the lives of trans and non-binary people in the UK through archive material and real life events spanning the period from 1846 to 2014.
  • Dr Alexandra Stang is Head of Information Services at the Goethe-Institut in Finland, the German cultural association where she has been leading on a project called Artificially correct. The project aims to address biases and gendering in language translation tools used by translators, publishers and exhibition curators.
  • Our final speaker is Jazmin Scarlett, an independent researcher in historical and social volcanology who will discuss the representation of LGBTQ+ people in earth science and volcanology.