Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar and writer. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. Her books include What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters (2000) and Differences that Matter (1998). She blogs at feministkilljoys.com.

The book What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use (2019) published by Duke University Press, draws on cultural studies, gender and sexuality, feminism and Women’s Studies and Queer Theory to suggest queer use as a way of reanimating the project of diversity work and the painstaking task of opening up institutions to those who have historically been excluded. See more details here

Sarah Pierce is an artist based in Dublin and teaches in the School of Visual Culture at the National College if Art and Design. Since 2003 she has used the term The Metropolitan Complex to describe her project, characterised by forms of gathering in historical examples and those she initiates. The processes of research and presentation that Pierce undertakes demonstrate a broad understanding of cultural work and a continual renegotiation of the terms for making art, the potential for dissent and self-determination. Pierce works with installation, performance, archives, talks and papers, often opening these up to the personal and the incidental in ways that challenge received histories and forms of making. Her sources include civil rights movements and student culture, the historical legacies of figures such as El Lissitzky, August Rodin, and Eva Hesse, and theories of community and love founded in Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille. Pierce’s work has shown widely in the EU, US and Canada, most recently in exhibitions at the Centre of Contemporary Art, Derry (2018, 2017); Rua Red, Tallaght (2017), Hessel Museum & CCS Galleries, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2016, 2013, 2012), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2015), and the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (2015). In 2014, she staged a three-part solo exhibition at Walter Philips Gallery Banff, Mercer Union Toronto, and SBC Gallery Montreal. In 2005 Pierce represented Ireland in a group exhibition at the 51st Venice Biennale. She participated in Glasgow International (2018), Eva International (2016, 2012), Lyon Biennial (2011), Sinop Biennial (2010), and the Moscow Biennial (2007). Publications on her work include No Title, published by CCA Derry and Sketches of Universal History Compiled from Several Authors, published by Book Works, London.