Wikipedia:GLAM/Protests and Suffragettes/About

About Protests and Suffragettes

Protests and Suffragettes (2013-present) is a creative project and social enterprise which seeks to recover and celebrate the histories of women activists in Scotland, UK. It is based in Govan, Glasgow and Dumfries. The project is led by a voluntary team of artists, activists, and local historians who are passionate about rediscovering the voices and actions of historical women activists and finding creative and inspiring ways to share their work – and when possible their exact words.

Since 2013 the project has hosted guided 'artWalks', a hybrid guided-walk/performance happening that uses temporary graffiti, banners, call-and-response techniques (inspired by the Occupy Movement’s ‘Human Megaphone’), chalking, and general merriment to re-voice the words of women back into the spaces they lived and worked. They also conduct oral histories and in-depth archival research, give talks, host creative workshops, self-publish zines, 'redraw' historical posters, and devise creative interventions in the public realm. The project team greatly values Wikipedia as a form of knowledge activism, and has hosted a number of Wikipedia Workshops in person and online and in association with Wikimedia UK, Glasgow Women's Library, and Women's History Scotland.

Protests and Suffragettes has been researching specific protest movements and the women who led them in and around Govan, Glasgow since 2013. Their research focus includes the 1915 Rent Strikes, Glasgow’s Suffragettes, the 1971 Upper Clyde Shipbuilder’s Work-In, and the 1996 Kinning Park Complex Sit-In and community take-over. During 2020-2021, they expanded this geographic focus to include Scottish suffrage more generally.

Protests and Suffragettes was founded and is led by socially-engaged artist t s Beall and began as part of practice-based doctoral research at the University of Glasgow Theatre Studies in 2013. Current members of the voluntary team include Clare Thompson, Ines Cavaco, Jill McKean, Gray Mitchell, Lydia Levitt, Pam Hazelwood, Stacy Nicolson, and others who prefer to remain mysterious. It has met regularly since 2013 but remained largely publicly offline until 2020, when the group started a Facebook Page followed by Twitter and Instagram.

During the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the team ran a highly successful crowdfunding event. With these funds they researched and produced a deck of Scotland's Suffragette Trump Cards which highlight suffrage activism in Scotland. They also collaborated with the professional educators from Braw Talent to produce an education pack, including lesson plans, decks of cards, and zines, which were donated to schools around Scotland.

In 2023, Protests and Suffragettes were awarded funded by The Big Lottery Fund and Wikimedia UK to run thirteen community workshops. Outputs of these workshops included a range of co-designed posters and postcards, and four Wikipedia workshops, which were run as hybrid events in libraries and archives around Glasgow and online, allowing for both local and global participation.