Join us for a group reading and discussion around Sara Ahmed’s 2019 book What’s the Use: On The Uses of Use, led by Frances Whorrall-Campbell. We will be reading the book’s conclusion, ‘Queer Use’, in order to think about how institutions seek to use queer identity and queers as products within a diversity economy, but also how we might use these structures ‘queerly’ in return. Together we will develop a toolkit against our use, and consider how we make ourselves useful to each other without being used up.

This workshop is open to all. You might be interested if you are working with diversity practices in institutions, but also more specifically if you are a queer and/or trans artist who wants to think in community about these questions and develop practical strategies of survival and resistance.

Frances Whorrall-Campbell is a writer, researcher, and artist. They work across text, performance, and participatory workshops in search of practices of trans sustenance. Particularly invested in humour, metaphor, and puns as queer methods, their work often occupies fluid and surprising forms – breaking the boundaries of medium and genre conventions.

Their writing has been published by Art-Agenda, Art Monthly, The Architectural Review and The White Review, and they have shown work/performed at the Manchester International Festival; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; and San Mei Gallery, London. Frances is a Research Associate at CCA Derry~Londonderry, from 2021-23, and is currently working with the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing on an ethical and fluid archive using linked open data.