Feminist Loose Ends
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-08-06

Marking the closing weeks of our epic exhibition on women’s rights, curator Polly Russell and guests explore the preoccupations, hanging threads and lingering dreams that have emerged from Unfinished Business: the Fight for Women’s Rights.

Polly Russell is Head of the Eccles Centre for Americas Studies at the British Library. She is the Lead Curator for Unfinished Business. She was also the project lead for Sisterhood & After: An Oral history of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Her column The History Cook appears in the Financial Times Saturday magazine, she also presents on BBC2’s Back in Time.

Rafia Zakaria is an attorney, human rights activist and author of Against White Feminism (September, Penguin) The Upstairs Wife, and Veil, part of the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series. Her writing appears in The Baffler, DAWN, NYT and Guardian. Zakaria is currently a Research Scholar at the Colin Powell Center for Civic Leadership at City College New York.

Alison Phipps has been a scholar-activist in the movement against sexual violence for fifteen years. She co-authored the NUS report, That's What She Said, and is Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Sussex, soon to be Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University. She wrote Me, Not You: the trouble with mainstream feminism (2020 Manchester University Press)

Shelley Mitchell joined The Outsiders Project in 2019 and has performed her writing in theatres, mental health settings and prisons. She went to rehab 10 times and got clean in 2016. The Outsiders Project’s vision is to show that people sidelined from society can write, perform and create work of outstanding quality and worth.