The Coast is Queer Care Café with Lois Weaver

What do we share and what do we owe each other?

How are ‘we’ counted and who is included?

How is it possible to think, and feel, publicly?

Multi-award winning artist, activist and facilitator, Lois Weaver, will create an open, hospitable space for all of us – activists, writers, academics and audiences alike –  to gather ….. our wits, our thoughts and our comrades in action. This will be a temporary space for communitas, conversation and activity within a spoken and visible frame of ‘care’.

A lot of us are trying to figure out how to breathe through this present moment and look for ways to keep connected to each other while we figure out what to do about our future. It is a space which allows us to acknowledge social anxiety, our own vulnerabilities and our desire to enact and feel care.

It re-appropriates some of the aesthetic of café culture, with the arrangement of small tables and quiet conversation. However, the space also acknowledges and dismantles the common social anxieties associated with these spaces: closed conversations between strangers, a school-canteen-esque difficulty in knowing where to sit and with whom. Just by entering the Care Café, participants acknowledged something of their own vulnerability, their needs in the present moment, and their desire to give and receive care. 

Lois Weaver is an artist, activist, facilitator, and Professor of Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary University of London. Lois is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a Wellcome Trust Engaging Science Fellow for 2016-19. She was awarded the WOW Women in Creative Industries ‘Fighting the Good Fight’ award in 2018. In 2019 she was awarded an International Chair at Artec Paris 8 University at the National Institute for the History of Art, Paris, and the Queen Mary Centre for Public Engagement Hawking Award for Developed Understanding of Public Engagement. Her work hinges on visibility, challenging convention, and public engagement.

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.

The care cafe is part of the Building 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.