As we were formulating our National Lottery Heritage Fund application over the summer, we wanted to anchor our proposed activities in three or four clear ‘themes’. These themes needed to reflect AI’s ethos and mission, give us clear goals to work towards… and be of interest to our audiences!
So where better to start than our previous successful events and activities over the last 19 years? We thought of our Town Hall Meetings about Armenian women’s participation in society, and book launches of the reprints of Zabel Yessayan’s works. We thought about our immensely successful ‘Salon Mashup: Displacement + Regeneration’, and all of the lectures, workshops, and films we have hosted about refugees, displacement, and migration over the years. We thought about our annual Hrant Dink commemoration, which so often involves acknowledging the ways in which the Armenian community is intricately connected to neighbouring communities, past and present. And we thought of all our poetry readings, book launches, graphic fiction workshops, and our own publications which celebrate Armenian literary heritage.
From there, it was easy (especially as many of these themes overlap with my own research as a historian of the Armenian genocide into gender, absorption, and displacement during the genocide). Our four themes became:
Exploring Gender (understanding identities, histories, and heritage)
Migration, Displacement and Refugees (understanding Armenian and other communities’ experiences)
Neighbours, Historic and Present (examining shared histories, diversity, and interconnections)
Literary Heritage (understanding its continuing influence on identity and heritage)
Over the next two and a half years, our NLHF-funded activities will be exploring these themes across a variety of formats – Diaspora Forums, film series, workshops, open mic events, and book clubs. We want to challenge and open new conversations, as well as have fun doing so – we hope you will join us!
A more detailed version of this article is included in the latest issue of Bardez .