Nat Raha

Nat Raha headshot

(Photo credit: Nat Raha)

Nat Raha is working with us on the project Liberation Laboratory.

Centring transfeminist, queer and abolitionist practices and approaches to mutual aid and collective worldmaking, the liberation laboratory intends to connect people involved in LGBTQI+ mutual aid projects, wider community members, and performance artists. Adopting methods of live research and self-study, through public and closed discussions, knowledge sharing, hangouts and performance practices, the lab will function as a space made for comparing notes on approaches, practical methods and on infrastructures of collective support.  

The Liberation Lab will also explore the relationship between queer performance practices and the ‘performance’ of collective worldmaking, by putting the two in dialogue with each otherRaha will link up with a range of activist groups, potentially in a few different cities, to order to foster the conditions of research and study.  

The work is based on theoretical ideas from Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift’s book, Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024); and as part of the project, Nat will continue to develop an ongoing, reflective performance work, solidarity & house 

Bio :

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and the more-than-human. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance. 

Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Winner of the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Nat’s work is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems (Vintage 2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018). Her poetry has been translated in numerous languages. Recent performances include epistolary (on carceral islands), co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023. Recent critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022), Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021), New Feminist Literary Studies (CUP, 2020) and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine, and is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024). 

Projects

Rehearsals (for a world we could live in)

The programme explores practices of world building which enact and perform more just and liveable worlds, alongside the concept of the rehearsal. Read more

Visiting Artists

Ahead of a new programme theme in autumn 2024, Radar has invited a series of visiting artists to engage with research across Loughborough University’s two campuses. Read more