By Immy Burgess
Featured image: Lorna Elizabeth

aAh! speaks to 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Festival organisers Kim Moore and Frazer Heritage ahead of the launch.

Manchester Metropolitan University is hosting the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence campaign, a powerful initiative running from 25th November – International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women – to 10th December, Human Rights Day.

The campaign brings together poets, academics and activists, and aims to tackle the pressing issue of gender-based violence through creative expression and open dialogue across a programme spanning 16 events.

The programme features a range of speakers, readings and workshops, including prominent scholars and activists such as Everyday Sexism Founder, Laura Bates, author Katherine Angel, and poet and playwright, Joelle Taylor.

Spearheading the festival is Dr Kim Moore, a Forward Prize-winning poet and senior lecturer, Dr Frazer Heritage, senior lecturer in Linguistics and Sexuality Studies, and Sarah Cleave, lecturer in Publishing and Creative Writing at Manchester Met.

Moore, a long-time advocate for the campaign, reflected on the significance of the events: “Holding things like this up to the light and drawing attention to these issues – whether through poetry or conversation – can make a huge difference. If I’d had those conversations when I was an 18-year-old girl, it would have changed my life.”

She adds: “I’ve always done something to mark the 16 Days of Activism campaign since working as a freelance writer. One year, I released a poem every day on my blog where I’ve written about an experience of domestic violence. I’ve always tried to mark it in some way.”

Moore is a long-time advocate for the festival, having used her skills in creative writing and her platform as a Forward Prize-winning poet to shed light on gender-based violence which she describes as a “national emergency”.

As part of the 16 Days of Activism campaign, Moore is working closely with Heritage and Cleave, who bring their own expertise and passion to the campaign: “Frazer [Heritage] and I met at an early researcher network event and just got on really well. One day, I found him in his office and said, ‘Frazer, do you fancy doing this?’

“We’re still in the stages of starting conversations about these issues and raising awareness. I thought it would be really exciting to bring lots of poets and writers together who are writing about sexism and gender-based violence, have them at the same event, and just see what happens. It’s very much a start of this conversation that we hope is going to continue and continue and get bigger and more useful.”

Heritage also highlights the personal and professional insight that he and his fellow colleagues bring to the festival: “Even outside of the 16 Days of Activism, the three of us, along with the other speakers at the events, do a lot of work on misogyny. There’s a really clear link to what we do in our professional research.”

Heritage adds: “One of the big hopes for us is to open up those conversations about how creative writing, poetry, language-based research and tools can tackle misogyny. We hope this not only provides people with a creative outlet to express their experiences but also changes the way people think about these issues.”

Moore reflects on the power of creative writing to help people process their experiences and find a sense of solidarity: “It’s about using poetry to create a new way of thinking about these things, and that might be naming them, first of all. There are still so many times when I perform my work at readings, I get – mainly women, but sometimes men – coming up and saying, ‘That’s happened to me, but I didn’t have language for it’, ‘I didn’t know how to express it’, ‘I didn’t know how to articulate it,’ or ‘I didn’t know it was called that.’ It’s about opening up a new way of thinking about it and hopefully changing attitudes of how we think about it.”

Heritage emphasises the festival’s focus on making real-world change: “We want to do something that’s very activist at its core and is able to create social change. It’s not about sitting in the beautiful Grosvenor East building which can be an ivory tower, it’s about making sure it actually gets implemented on the ground as well.”

He also underscores the importance of collective action in tackling systemic issues: “What we need is to actually organise and politically get together. We are stronger as a collective unit. We also need to emphasise that collectively, we are the people who make those differences. We still have to act on it. We can march politically. We can put pressure on governments and organisations and all these different things that are ruining the fabric of society. For women, non-binary people, feminine presenting people, we are the ones with the power that need to actually organise as well.”

The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Festival runs from 25th November to 10th December, 2024. For more information and tickets, visit mmu.ac.uk/news-and-events