The Sylvia Pankhurst Network is hosting its annual lecture, Intersectional Feminism: Resistance, Community Power and Transformative Justice, featuring Lady Unchained in conversation with Sandhya Sharma.
Lady Unchained is a poet, author of “her debut book - Behind Bars on Punishment, Prison and Release”, and Award-Winning Broadcaster for National Prison, and the Founder and Creative Director of Unchained Poetry, an artistic platform for artists. Her mission is to prove that there is life after prison, using creativity, storytelling, and platform‑building as tools for liberation and change.
Sandhya Sharma is an anti‑racist feminist activist with over 30 years’ experience in grassroots struggles to end violence against women and girls, centring the lives and resistance of Black, minoritised, and migrant women. Her political awakening began in 1993 at Subah, a refuge for young South Asian women. She co‑founded Safety4Sisters Northwest and co‑edited This Is We, a migrant women’s writing anthology. Concerned by the marginalisation of minoritised women’s organising in academic scholarship and activist chronicles, she began a PhD in Sociology at the University of Manchester in 2024. Her research documents the struggles of South Asian feminists organising in Manchester in the 80s and 90s, creates a radical archive of their activism, and traces their legacies for future generations.
Together, Lady Unchained and Sandhya Sharma will explore intersectional feminism as a practice of resistance, community power, and transformative justice.