Human Rights Education and Monitoring Center (EMC) organizes second Queer Forum on January 12, 13 and 14th, 2018. The main aim of the Forum is to critically rethink existed political reality, controversial practices and forms, to analyze global and local perspectives and to trigger alternative thinking and creation of strategies of queer resistance through guided discussion. Beyond analysis of existed reality, Forum strives to create alternative leftist educational space and to encourage mobilization of groups for united struggle against oppressive structures. 

Participant of three day Forum are scholars working on philosophy, social sciences and gender studies from Georgia and from different countries:

⚫January 12 - 19:00-21:00 public Lecture: The (Post) Socialist Politics of Sexuality
Speaker: Piro Rexhepi, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity 
- Piro Rexhepi holds a PhD in Politics from University of Strathclyde and is currently a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. His research focuses on the politics of religion, sexuality and coloniality in international relations, with a particular focus on the relationship between the Balkans and the Middle East.

⚫January 13 - 11:00-13:00 Public Lecture: Feminist and Queer Politics against Neoliberalism, 
- Speaker: Johanna Oksala, Associate Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Pratt Institute Johanna Oksala is a philosopher specializing in political philosophy, feminist philosophy, environmental philosophy, Foucault, and phenomenology. Before coming to Pratt, Oksala taught at University of Dundee, UK, University of Helsinki, Finland, and The New School for Social Research, USA.
11:00-11:45 Video Lecture: Fighting to Win: Resisting False Victories and Building a World We Can Live In
⚫Speaker: Dean Spade, Associate professor at the Seattle University School of Law
Dean Spade is an associate professor at the Seattle University School of Law. In 2002, he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit collective that provides free legal help to low-income people and people of color who are trans, intersex and/or gender non-conforming and works to build trans resistance rooted in racial and economic justice. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (Duke University Press 2015).

12:00-14:00 Public Lecture: No Compromises: Queer Alliances to Bring Down Planetary Coloniality, Capitalism, and Misogyny
⚫Speaker: Paola Bacchetta, Professor at University of California, Berkley 
Paola Bacchetta is a Professor and Vice Chair of Pedagogy in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Bacchetta has published over fifty articles in professional journals and book chapters. She is a longtime activist in lesbian and queer of color, feminist, anti-racism, decolonial, anti-war, anti-occupation, and anti-right-wing movements, in the U.S., France, India and Italy.

At the Queer Forum, edited volume will be presented and distributed. 
Simultaneous translation will be provided and video footage of the lectures will be carried out.