Refusing Silence: Mapping Cultural Resistance to Genocide

Dr. Chandra Frank is a feminist queer researcher and independent curator. She is currently Assistant Professor Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and the 2024-2027 Taft Professor of the Public Humanities. Dr. Frank’s interdisciplinary creative research focuses on feminist and queer of color movement work, possibilities of dissent, and the ways in which race and the environment work as terrains of power. She explores critical walking methodologies, and multi-modal methodologies related to art, ecology and public histories. She is completing her first monograph in progress, Tidal Politics: Feminist Queer Diaspora & Refusal in the Netherlands, which charts the creative and strategic interruption of feminist queer movement work in the 1980s alongside the literal and figurative sinking landscape and racial climate of the Netherlands. Dr. Frank is a member of the Visual Cultures Research Group, Taft Floats at the University of Cincinnati.

Her curatorial practice explores the politics of care, experimental forms of narration, and the colonial grammar embedded within display and exhibition arrangements. Dr. Frank’s curated exhibitions include Visions of Possibilities (Bonnefanten Museum, 2023), Ecologies of Elsewhere co-curated with Dr. Portia Malatjie (Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, 2023), Re(as)sisting Narratives (Framer Framed, 2016 and District Six Museum), Fugitive Desires (198 Gallery), and Proclamation 73 (Durban Art Gallery, 2018) (co-curated with Zara Julius).

Dr. Frank co-leads the Tidal Studies Group - a collaborative group exploring the politics of water, mud, swamps, muck, colonial water management, as well as queer feminist diasporic explorations of water.

Dr Nesreen N. Hussein is a theatre and performance studies scholar, educator, and maker. Her work is grounded in the intersections of performance, politics, and activism, and is informed by understandings of identity and belonging. The work also draws on “Global South” epistemologies, post-colonial critique, and decolonial praxes. Her scholarship appears in various publications, including Contemporary Theatre Review; Theatre, Dance and Performance Training; Theatre Research International; Global Performance Studies; and Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest. She is Co-editor of Global Performance Studies (GPS), and Associate Editor of Performance Research. Nesreen’s scholarship has been recognised by receiving the Helsinki Prize and the New Scholars Prize, both from the International Federation for Theatre Research in 2011. In 2024, her edited special issue, “Decolonisation and Performance Studies” in GPS (2022), received the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s Edited Collection Award. In 2025, Nesreen joined the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, Unit of Middle East and Muslim Societies at the University of Bern as Associate Researcher. 

Farah Saleh is a Palestinian dancer, choreographer and scholar based in Scotland. She took part in projects with Sareyyet Ramallah Dance Company (Palestine), the Royal Flemish Theatre and Les Ballets C de la B (Belgium), Mancopy Dance Company (Denmark/Lebanon), Siljehom/Christophersen (Norway), and Candoco Dance Company (UK). Saleh has also been teaching dance, coordinating and curating artistic projects, including the Sareyyet Ramallah Summer Dance School, which she co-founded in 2016. In 2014 she won the third prize of the Young Artist of the Year Award (YAYA) organized by A.M. Qattan Foundation in Palestine for her installation A Fidayee Son in Moscow and in 2016 the dance prize of Palest’In and Out Festival in Paris for the duet La Même. She was an Associate Artist at Dance Base 2017-2021 and in 2023 she earned her practice-based PhD from Edinburgh College of Art. In 2024, Saleh started a lectureship in Global Majority Performance at the Theatre Studies department at Glasgow University.