Doorways: Women, Homelessness, Trauma and Resistance – a Discussion

How much do we know about the trials of life for the growing number of women forced to live on our streets, in hostels or in homeless shelters? Their presence is not just a personal tragedy, but a social and political act of violence and injustice.

To mark the publication of Doorways: Women, Homelessness, Trauma and Resistance, publishers House Sparrow Press are hosting a discussion about the crisis of women’s homelessness.

As the effects of capitalism and relentless property speculation blight and restrict the lives of millions, ‘Doorways’ delivers an urgent and uncompromising dispatch on the realities of austerity, gendered violence and social cleansing in Britain today.

Growing out of the extreme personal experience that informed the sound and photographic works of artist Bekki Perriman’s The Doorways Project, at the core of the book are interviews with one of society’s most marginalised groups — women experiencing street homelessness.

For this event, artists and activists Bekki Perriman, Shiri Shalmy, Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Andrea Gibbons, whose work features in the book, will be in conversation, exploring the cultural, social and political dimensions of homelessness, as well as the role of artists and institutions in challenging it.

The discussion will be chaired by editor and publisher Jess Chandler.

House Sparrow Press seeks to publish creatively committed, collaborative works both at a time that is relevant and for reasons that feel compelling. It is drawn to manuscripts of hybridity, titles that might elude conventional publication over concerns of form or scale. It also believes in a modesty of style (but never of ambition) and a fecundity of ideas. Previous publications are ​’A Sparrow’s Journey: John Berger reads Andrey Platonov’ a​nd ​’Infinite Gradation’ ​by Anne Michaels.

This event is part of Antiuniversity Now Festival 2019 (15-22 June). See the full programme on antiuniversity.org

This event is in the Brockway Room on the ground floor (Ground floor – accessible. Induction loop audio). For accessibility info: conwayhall.org.uk/about/visiting-us