PROTEST! - Documenting Dissent, exploring Manchester’s queer protest history.
This one off gala event as part of the amazing Scene Festival, marks the culmination of PROTEST! – Documenting Dissent, our two year National Lottery Heritage Fund supported project exploring Manchester’s queer protest history and the long shadow of Section 28.
For more information including ticket news, see our Events page!
Re/Assemble now available on YouTube
Premiered at the SCENE Festival on Wednesday 26 August, our short film RE/ASSEMBLE is now available on You Tube.
PROTEST! Unfinished Business: A Section 28 Assembly
Friday 25 September 1.00 – 4.30pm
People’s History Museum, Manchester
Section 28 may be gone but its story isn’t finished
Section 28 was repealed. But legislation doesn’t simply disappear. Its traces remain in institutions, in bodies, in memories, in language, in culture, in education, in activism, and in the ways LGBTQIA+ communities continue to organise, resist and make space. What did it change? What did it leave behind? And what does its legacy mean for LGBTQIA+ communities now?
As the final event in IAP:MCR’s PROTEST! project, Unfinished Business will bring together artists, activists, academics, creative practitioners, makers, thinkers, writers and others to congregate, share ideas, ask questions, debate and explore the legacies of Section 28, and to ask what its unfinished business might be today.
OPEN CALL: PRESENTATIONS
We are inviting proposals for up to six 15-minute presentations to form part of the assembly. We’re interested in work that sits somewhere between research and practice, history and speculation, personal experience and collective memory. You might want to present a paper. Or a performance. Or a lecture-performance. A reading. A film. A proposition. A provocation. An experiment. Or something we haven’t thought of yet. There are no prescribed formats.
We’re looking for contributions that might engage with, challenge or reframe questions around:
• The legacies and afterlives of Section 28
• LGBTQIA+ activism, politics and organising
• Histories of protest and resistance
• The politics of protest now
• Queer archives, memories and lived experience
• Art, culture and community
• Education, institutions and representation
• What has changed — and what hasn’t
• Intergenerational queer histories
• The relationship between past struggles and present ones
• Possible futures, new forms of resistance and unfinished stories
• Where we go next...
We’re open to the unexpected. Perhaps you have been researching something for years. Perhaps you have an idea that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else. Perhaps there is a story, object, image, archive, memory or question that you want to put into the room.
How to apply:
Send us a brief outline of your proposed presentation — either: A maximum of one side of A4 in writing OR a short video of no more than 3 minutes.
Send submissions to jez.dolan@iapmcr.co.uk
Deadline: 31 August 2026
Successful applicants will be notified by 4 September 2026.
Each selected presenter will receive a £250 fee, payable on receipt of invoice.
Come and add your voice to the conversation. Section 28 is history — but the unfinished business is ours.
