Feminist Webs National Launch is taking place on 10th March at the People’s History Museum

There will be fun, food and workshops, so please come along!!!

Details and the flyer can be downloaded here

Sunday 4^th March, 2012, 11am – 6pm

Un-Conventional Women is launched at The Great Hall on Sunday 4^th March with a day where an album will be recorded produced and released with an entirely female crew. The album sleeve will be designed, posters screen printed and websites created. The idea is to demystify the recording process.

Un-Conventional Women aims to inspire and support a new generation of women in music and the media: to celebrate the achievements and contribution women make, and address openly the inequalities they must overcome in doing so. Un-Conventional Women will challenge the difficulties faced by each new generation of musicians, broadcasters and creators, and have the conversations that are so often left unspoken. Yet Un-Conventional Women will be a positive experience: a mixture of panels, workshops, mentoring schemes and performances all curated by a majority female advisory Steering Group.

Panels will include: ‘The Equality and Diversity Charter’, ‘Women in Music and Media’, ‘Record Labels in the Digital Age’, ‘How to put on a Great Festival’ (curated by the Association of Independent Festivals), ‘The Aesthetics of Music’ and ‘Punk, Politicisation and the DIY Ethic.’

Our all female panellist line-up includes: Vick Bain (Chief Operating Officer of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers & Authors: BASCA), Remi Harris (UK Music), Liz Pugh (Walk the Plank), Becki Stephens (Singer with The Projectionists, ex-Pipettes), Kerry Harvey-Piper (Owner of Red Grape Records & Management), Julie Weir (Visible Noise/Wiseblood Management), Jayne Compton (Switchflicker Record Label and Club Brenda), Hannah Overton (XL Recordings), Tash Willcocks (Graphic Designer and Lecturer), Louise Gardener and Angela Louise Gardner (Design by Day), Gee Vaucher (artist), Tracey Moberley (author and interdisciplinary artist) and many more!

We will also be recording an album in a day during the event with recordings from Steph Grant and Kirsty Almeida, Jesca Hoop, Viv Albertine (The Slits) and The Projectionists and an evening performance from 22-piece female choir: Gaggle and Jesca Hoop.

There will also be additional activities such as a Screen Printing Workshop, Album Sleeve Making Workshop and Graphic Design Sessions and a Digital Area by Soundcloud.

This event is free to attend and supported by Manchester City Council.

Un-Convention

Un-Convention is a global grassroots music and creative community – that meets physically and virtually to share ideas; discusses and debates cutting edge issues around music, technology and creativity; and facilitates members engagement with their peers.

The community is driven by a not-for-profit initiative that sees opportunity for the grassroots in changes to the way that music is being produced, consumed and sustained. Un-Convention understands that the most interesting stuff happens on the margins. We don’t mind the mainstream; we just don’t find it relevant. Un-Convention doesn’t believe in ‘do it yourself’. We believe in ‘do it together’.

www.unconventionhub.org

Former gang member reveals how women suffer shocking sexual abuse in return for ’status’

A female former gang member has exposed the growing levels of sexual violence against young women who join them, saying that many are willing to risk being raped in return for the status of membership.

Read it in the Guradian on facebook here

If you have followed the surge in lap dancing clubs and have found, like many of us, this to be a strange and unwelcome trend you may find this article interesting.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16869029

From the ICA USA archive comes this film about women of the World c1985. Your thoughts on it welcome!

Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) is one of the world’s great feminist writers and social theorists, with her novels including The Story of an African Farm and her political treatises including Woman and Labour among many other writings. She also wrote c4800+ exceptionally important letters between 1871 and 1920, a period of momentous changes in the world which her letters are concerned with, and which also brought changes regarding letter-writing and literary practices too. Schreiner’s letters – all of them, in full, detailed and easy to read transcriptions – are available world-wide in a fully-searchable electronic edition published in January 2012. The Olive Schreiner Letters Online is hosted at www.oliveschreiner.org and provides a new, detailed, and unique electronic resource for social science, literary, historical, cultural geography, feminist, women’s & gender studies, and African studies research.