The conference will be compered by

Kate Smurthwaite, comedian and feminist activist.

SATURDAY OPENING 9.30 - 10.15

SOPHIE WALKER

Leader of the Women's Equality Party

KEYNOTE SPEECH: CORDELIA FINE

Testosterone Rex: Myths of sex, science and society

We’re all familiar with Testosterone Rex: the pervasive idea that risk-taking, competitive masculinity evolved in males to enhance reproductive success, and that these traits are therefore wired into the male brain, and fueled by testosterone. This compelling set of interconnected beliefs seem to offer an explanation for why men are much more likely than women to achieve Rex-like status in society – but do the scientific ideas bear up to scrutiny?

CLAIRE HEUCHAN

Interracial solidarity in the Women's Movement

The feminist movement has the potential to change the world by liberating women and girls from oppression. It contains countless women and, with them, countless possibilities. Among those possibilities is the potential for interracial solidarity between women. Highlighting ways for women to use difference as a creative force in our lives and politics, Claire will discuss practical methods of unpicking racism within feminist spaces and offer a radical vision of sisterhood.

SATURDAY MORNING 10.45 - 12.15

BREAKAWAY SESSION OPTIONS (PICK ONE)

When Courage Is "Illegal" - The Story of Women Refugees

Refugee women face the keenest injustices as they cross borders seeking safety. Women for Refugee Women has been campaigning against these injustices, particularly against the indefinite detention of women in Yarl’s Wood, and ensuring the voices of refugee women are heard in the women’s movement. How can you support the campaign against detention for women seeking asylum? What do the experiences of refugee women tell us about the failures of the state to protect women? How can we build solidarity now to ensure justice and safety for women seeking asylum? Gemma Lousley from Women for Refugee Women will be speaking with Vivian, who was detained in Yarl’s Wood detention centre, alongside Jennifer Blair and Frances Trevena. Chair: Daniela Pichler.

LA LA Land

Putting the freeze on strip tease: a workshop on challenging local authorities who license sexual entertainment venues.

Are you involved in campaigning against SEVs (lap dancing clubs) in your local area, or are you thinking of starting a campaign? In this practical workshop, Alison Boydell and Helen Mott will share their experiences, information and resources gained over years of feminist campaigning in Sheffield and Bristol.

Speakers: Dr Sasha Rakoff, Alison Boydell, Helen Mott

Political Awakening

We are in the midst of a ‘democratic surge’, suddenly a radical and egalitarian alternative to the right-wing neoliberal domination of Parliamentary politics seems possible, it is finding its voice, making plans, having an effect. This has huge implications for feminism.

Speakers: Sirio Canos, Beatrix Campbell , Kate Flannery,



Getting justice for women when men are violent

How can we use the law to challenge the failures of the government and state institutions to prevent violence against women and girls? How can we defend women subject to discrimination and penalisation by the criminal justice system? This workshop will explore both frightening developments and inspiring legal challenges of a patriarchal criminal justice system.

The panel includes: Harriet Wistrich, lawyer and founder of the Centre for Women’s Justice; Pragna Patel, campaigner and director of Southall Black Sisters; Professor Lisa Avalos on rape complainants charged with perverting the course of justice and Fiona Broadfoot on a ground-breaking legal challenge of criminal convictions arising from street prostitution.

Speakers: Harriet Wistrech, Pragna Patel, Lisa Avalos, Fiona Broadfoot

Revolutionary Women

October 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. On this occasion we are bringing together five prominent international speakers to discuss What it means and What it costs to be a female revolutionary. Dedicated to the role and struggles of women in the radical movements, this panel will pay tribute to the past and present female revolutionary thinkers and activists of Russia, Rojava and the UK, and will reflect on their shared and unique challenges, tactics and achievements.

Speakers: Anna Zobnina, Leda Garina, Angelina Lesniewski, Sheila Rowbotham, Nadia Plungian, and Rahila Gupta

Talking persuasively when you fundamentally disagree

Do you want to speak truth to power? Do you lobby decision makers, but find a lack of common ground stops your message getting through? This workshop is about how to speak to people when you think agreement is impossible.

Speaker: Jessica Metherington



SATURDAY AFTERNOON 1.15 - 2.45

BREAKAWAY SESSION OPTIONS (PICK ONE)

Prison Doesn’t Work

Hear from the national charity Women In Prison and women affected by the criminal justice system on the urgent need to dismantle our broken and harmful prison system and how you can help achieve the starting ambition of reducing the women's prison population to 2,020 by 2020.

Femicide

Femicide is a sex-based hate crime carried out by men against women; some argue that it is the ultimate expression of patriarchy. Femicide names what Diana Russell calls the “sexual politics of murder”

On this panel we will hear about the campaign ‘Counting Dead Women’ and the significance of the Femicide Census; Spanish hunger strikers against Femicide; Turkish women ‘Dying to Divorce’ and the disappearing of Canada’s First Nations women.

Speakers: Karen Ingala-Smith, Gloria Vasquez, Sara Estrada, Sinead Kirwan, Zahra Bahman

Flaunting Fearlessness

Can we reclaim the body positivity movement before it tries to shame us?

A panel of 4 speakers discuss what body positivity means to them, cultural conditioning within the current media body positivity movement, and if the want to change your body is a feminist journey to undertake.

Anti-Shame Week founders will host a workshop to discuss and explore how body shaming changes with age, race, health and body shape.

Speakers: Ellie Richardson, Kiran Gandhi (via Skype), Hilary Farnworth, and

Sarah Beckett

Abortion Act: 50 years

The 1967 Abortion Act was 50 years ago, but many women in the UK and Ireland still do not have the right to an abortion. Abortion seekers from both Northern Ireland (still part of the UK) and the Republic of Ireland, have to travel, mainly to Britain, for a safe and legal abortion for which they must pay considerable sums of money. This is not possible for all women, leaving them vulnerable to criminalisation, back street procedures and all the associated complications, including death.

Witness also the global push back of women’s reproductive autonomy in the US, Poland and elsewhere. The session will also consider the anti-choice movement, focusing on the harassment women face outside clinics when seeking abortion services.

We will hear from women who recognise that in spite of the Abortion Act, there is still a long way to go, and we will hear from Poland where women organised a mass strike against the anti-abortion bill.

Speakers: Krystyna Kacpura, Ann Rossiter, Claire Henry, Helena Walsh, Clare Murphy and Dr Pam Lowe

Changing scripts to challenge gender inequalities ****** SOLD OUT ********

Gradual games and exercises will give you the opportunity to start a playful and collective examination of the roots of gender inequalities and bring to the stage simple situations where you believe they appear. Should we accept the stories that surround us or can we change them? How can we tackle gender stereotypes in our daily lives? How can we challenge the attitudes which normalise discrimination and violence? Through image and forum theatre we will express problematic situations and rehearse possible solutions.

There is absolutely no need to have acting experience. Your life is the expertise we will use to build a stronger collective awareness. If you enjoy games, and believe everyone has an immense creative potential to trigger change in everyday life then this workshop is for you.

Speakers: Anne Laure Humbert and Claudia Signoretti

Feminist Art: Access, Activism and Representation

This session will address important issues in the creation of feminist art: access, activism and representation. We will explore the difficulties accessing the art world and the struggle to be taken seriously as artists, and on the application of feminist art in reframing justice for victim-survivors of rape.

Speakers: Daniela Pilcher, Sophie Doherty, Carmen Aleman, Rose Gibbs

SATURDAY AFTERNOON 3.15 - 4.45

BREAKAWAY SESSION OPTIONS (PICK ONE)

Women and the environment: a feminist perspective of the current environmental situation

How does the natural environment affect women? Are women more affected by climate change than men? What is the role of women in biodiversity conservation? How does water scarcity threaten women around the world? How can women be empowered by the sustainable management of natural resources?

This session will explore the relationship between gender and the environment, how the most pressing environmental issues are affecting women’s lives and, most importantly, how women are part of the solution.

Speakers: Louisa Gosling, Mireya Méndez De la Torre, Dr Halima Begum, Kate Metcalf



Putting Class back into Feminism

1515 - 1645 WORKING CLASS WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

The foundations of the working class women’s movement can be traced to minimum wage strikes in Dewsbury in 1875; the Bryant and May match workers strike in 1888 and the chain makers strike in 1901; the sewing machinists who went on strike for equal pay in Fords in Dagenham and the speech and language therapists who took the government to European court for equal pay in the NHS.

The movement draws strength from democratically elected women’s structures in trade unions which bring together women from all sectors of the economy and regions and nations to determine the policy platform for women at work and in our communities.

Working class women are struggling to make ends meet. The system of social security is broken, leaving many of us in poverty. The opportunities for decent jobs have been destroyed by neoliberal economic policy. If we can find work we are working in a world where targets are increased once we have met them, we are regularly long working hours of unpaid overtime, two or three part time jobs, insecure work and zero hours contracts. When we get pregnant we are likely to be sacked and if we return to work we juggle child care. Our pensions have been stolen and we have a Government that is determined to make us pay for a global financial crash which took place because our campaigns for regulation of global financial markets were ignored.

Our strategy for equality is global, because capital is global. Our strategy is empowering, and political. Our strategy is to organise, to sign up as many women as possible to our union, because we know, above all, our strength is in our numbers

We are active in our workplaces, in our unions and in our communities in campaigns for gender equality. We campaign for abortion rights, defending the NHS from privatisation, campaigns against cuts to our benefits and the closures of sure start centres. We represent people at work who have had their pay cut, hours cut or jobs threatened by the Government’s austerity programme.

Speakers: Equality through Collective action, Unite the Union, Stop Benefit Cuts, Hope Rising Action Group, State Pension Inequality, WASPI pensions campaign

Speakers: Julie Longden, Siobhan Endean and others tbc

Sexual Exploitation of Women: Where Misogyny and Racism Meet

This panel, organised by the European Network of Migrant Women (ENOMW) and chaired by the British feminist Julie Bindel, will give platform to the African, Russian, Middle Eastern and South Asian women’s rights activists to critically discuss the global & European exploitation of female bodies, in which discrimination based on sex, race/ethnicity, class and legal status come together to justify the oldest form abuse of women, prostitution. From the trafficking of Nigerian females by the Black Axe gang, to the Arab girls temporarily “married off” for prostitution, to the European policy increasingly under pressure to normalise female sexual exploitation, the speakers will examine, from an intersectional perspective, what makes it difficult to resist the growing sex industry and what needs to be done to combat it, collectively.

In this panel, Julie Bindel will also introduce her newly published book “Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth”.

Speakers: Anna Zobnina, Alicia Arbid, Salome Mbugua, Julie Bindel and Sadia Hameed

Build A Girl

The Build A Girl Project was founded by Fiona Broadfoot, a survivor of Child Sexual Exploitation.

The project provides a safe and therapeutic environment for Girls and Young Women to 'Build A' Unique self by; raising aspirations and self-esteem. Empowering girls and young women to make safe and informed choices and healthy relationships.

Speaker: Fiona Broadfoot

Trump & Co: Bash Or Hug?

"The world is cold, dark and totally f##ked right now and I blame white men. They gave us Brexit and we have one as president of the US. Now the question is should we bash these men or hug them and help them to grow up?" Nimco Ali leads a session on men in power.

Women Making News, Women Changing The World

What would feminist news and current affairs look like?

We’ve heard a lot recently about the fight for more women making Hollywood movies, but what about our own TV News? How different would it look if women chose the stories and - more important maybe - the angle on the stories? And what happens when you make a story too radical for TV?

Feature and documentary film-maker Sue Clayton talks about her recent forays into TV news and Current Affairs, shows her new activist film on the Calais Jungle children, and argues that women do tell stories differently, and that in the world today more than ever, we need our voices to be heard loud and clear.

Speaker: Sue Clayton

www.calais.gebnet.co.uk

Calais Film Trailer

SATURDAY AFTERNOON 5.15-6.30

EMMA HUMPHREY MEMORIAL PRIZEGIVING