Blog Post 4: Moderators and Strikes
Finding speakers was relatively smooth compared to our struggles with getting moderators. We had originally planned on just doing one moderator for both sections. Our choice was a lawyer named Jaime Prada. Jaime studies human rights law and works heavily with queer students. They also speak multiple languages, one of which was Arabic, and are an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion officer. We were all very excited to be working with them but as the date of the event approached another strike date was called for the date of our event.
There was quite a bit of panic from the group. We knew many of the students and staff who had tickets to our event wouldn’t come if we were to hold it on March 15th. We weren’t even sure if our own professors would be able to attend. With just a few days of notice, we changed the entire date of the event by two weeks and moved it to March 29th, the only day that worked for all of our speakers but unfortunately not Jaime. This left us scrambling once more to fill that seat. This time we reached out to Gaia Duberti a Ph.D. student also studying the Skull Collection. Her knowledge of Sir William Turner was enough for us to want her as part of the event, but having done the same course we’re on made her all the more interesting as a potential moderator. We also reached out to Dr. Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani as we decided to add a second moderator to the mix. Maryam, who is one of our course organizers was willing to step up.
Maryam and Gaia agreeing to be part of the event was incredibly important to its success. they contributed knowledge of the collection and decolonization that we otherwise might have missed out on.
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