Mapping Culture and Connection Workshop

Where do we encounter each other in our city and beyond? What makes for meaningful contact across our queer generations? What kind of spaces for intergenerational connection would you like to see in Brighton, Hove, in the Downs and along the seaside coast?

In this workshop, Charlotte Wilcox, Vedrana Velickovic and University of Brighton students invite you to creatively and imaginatively interact with a map of Brighton and Hove and surrounding areas, to explore the opportunities for community building and solidarity across the generations.

On our map you will find selected quotations/provocations from Brighton’s queer writers and activists to spark a conversation about the present and absent queer cultural spaces for people of all ages in Brighton & Hove. Envisioning a hopeful, place-based future with a vibrant queer culture – at The Coast is Queer festival and beyond. Other than these examples of locality, the space of the map will be deliberately borderless and open to participants to centre their own stories, histories and places of intergenerational connection.

Using collage, writing and drawing, let’s co-create and imagine the ways in which our communities can come together in the face of the increasing far right/repressive/homophobic/transphobic cultural and political backlash. Pieces of this map will travel to the Lesbian Lives conference in New York City the following weekend, where the workshop will run again.

Collage and drawing materials will be provided, and you are also welcome to bring anything (collage materials e.g. zines, flyers, newspapers) that you would like to see added to the map.

Charlotte Wilcox is an integrative psychotherapist in clinical practice and is lecturer in critical mental health practice at the University of Brighton. Her research uses creative methods to explore lived experience and community-based relational practices. Charlotte runs the Queer Therapy Hub an LGBTQIA+ group practice in Brighton.

Vedrana Velickovic is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Brighton where she convenes modules on Queer Writing, Black British, Postcolonial and European Literatures. She is the author of Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literatures and Cultures: Imagining New Europe (Palgrave 2019) and several articles on Black British and post-Yugoslav women’s writers, BrexLit and post-communism. She is a Steering Group member of The Coast is Queer and co-founder (with Dr Vy Rajapillai) of the DeCol Collective.

This participatory mapping is part of the Building Queer Intergenerational Spaces Through Literature project funded by the AHRC 3.4 Ignite, University of Brighton led by Dr Vedrana Velickovic, Charlotte Wilcox and Lesley Wood. It builds on the 2024 AHRC Ignite 3.3 pilot project that explored the intergenerational space of The Coast is Queer festival

Places are limited to 25. 

Important: If you have booked a festival or day pass, you still need to register for this event to ensure your space. Follow the book bow link and select the Festival or Day Pass Holder Free Registration. No registration means we cannot guarantee you a space for this event.