Lee Walters

co-convener of International Partnerships

The impact of racism and sexism on lives, voices and practices that resist and dissent in the context of democratic Art and Culture Institutions (e.g. public galleries, playhouses, funding agencies) forms the central focus of the research; the argument being that a failure to tackle societal concerns and tensions of racism and sexism at an institutional level not only produces sexist and racist patterning and practices within but, significantly, reproduces an institutional culture of white-male-hetero-normative domination that further reduces possibilities for deepening democratic practice and transformation. Tracing genealogies of dissent within institutions and resistance to the institutionalisation process of art and culture, since c.2000, that centres the experiences of black and female and queer artists and practitioners, the research process will recall and reconstruct fragments, voices, in ways that would make us better understand and grapple with struggles relevant to visible and invisible forms of structural violence located in the institutional contexts.