Telling Stories, Making History, and Queering the Archive (featuring Mass Observation)

Following the success of last year’s workshop, Queering the Archive is teaming up with our colleagues at Mass Observation and Aghh! Zine for a bumper session of archival exploration, creative reflection and collage-making.

Danny, Erin, Jessica, Ellie, Kylie, Nuria and MNamug (it’s a veritable cast of thousands!) will guide you through the LGBTQ+ materials in University of Sussex Library’s collections and the Keep’s Mass Observation responses, with a particular focus on lesbian representation and AIDS.

The workshop will be fully interactive – you’ll get hands-on with rare and unique items, work through a series of creative exercises to encounter, play with, (re)create, and reflect on queer history and our place within it today, and finish off with the chance to create your own collages.

The workshop is free to attend (but you must register), and no previous experience is required – just an interest in the topic and a willingness to delve into the archive!

Erin James is a poet, creative researcher and facilitator working at the intersection of art and social change. Their framework for creating uses art forms such as poetry, sound, curation, facilitation, archiving, and photography as vessels for “artivism”. Erin has performed poetry at festivals and venues such as FemFest, Brighton Festival and Brighton Dome and had their poetry added to the curriculum at Sussex University. They have faciliated workshops for a number of organisations and venues such as Brighton and Sussex University, Mind Body & Earth and Brighton Museum.

Aghh! Zine is a zine created in Brighton and Hove by MNamug and Nuria Castro. We aim to create a safe space to discuss and investigate ourselves, society and subjects that are considered taboo or not mainstream. We also aim to provide a platform for new voices and easy access to publishing opportunities, with a focus on queer, BIPOC, and other underrepresented communities. In addition to our biannual publications, we run zine-making and creative workshops. 

Danny Millum and Kylie Okoro are both based in the University of Sussex’s Division of Library, Culture and Heritage, and are currently working on a project to develop a discrete LGBTQ+ collection of materials from the Library’s extensive Documents and Ephemera collection. They presented on this topic at the 2026 Sussex University Festival of Ideas as well as running sessions at last year’s Coast is Queer.

Jessica Scantlebury and Ellie Turner-Kilburn work at the Mass Observation Archive, an archive of everyday life, thought and feeling in the UK. The archive is held at The Keep and in the care of the University of Sussex. In February 2026 they ran ‘Queer Everyday’, a national call for submissions to the archive from the LGBTQ+ community, with the aim of capturing what it means to be queer in the UK today. They hope to run the project again in 2027.