Shameless! Festival London feat. Prof Joanna Bourke – How to Create Rape-Free Worlds
Watch Professor Joanna Bourke’s fascinating and optimistic talk (based on her forthcoming book Disgrace) at the Shameless! Festival of Activism Against Sexual Violence. In it she talks about how we can create a rape free world and what each of us can do in pursuit of this goal.
The Shameless! Festival of Activism Against Sexual Violence took place on 27th November 2021, created in collaboration by Birkbeck’s SHaME project and WOW – Women of the World. The festival featured high profile speakers, survivors, researchers and medical professionals, alongside performances by incredible artists, poets and musicians, interactive workshops, ‘how to’ clinics, wellness spaces and more.
Inspired by and building on the work of SHaME, WOW and activists and academics across the world, the festival aimed to revolutionise conversations around sexual violence; burst open inherited ideas of shame; and give everyone the chance to say to all societies, enough is enough, sexual violence must end. A number of the day’s talks are now available to watch on the Birkbeck YouTube channel, with captions by Stagetext.
Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the Principal Investigator of the SHaME project. She is the prize-winning author of fifteen books, as well as over 100 articles in academic journals. Among others, she is the author of Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present (2007), What it Means To Be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present (2011), and The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (2014). Reaktion Books will publish Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence in July 2022. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, and Greek. She is a frequent contributor to TV and radio shows, and a regular correspondent for newspapers.