Climate Change, COVID-19 and LGBTQ+ Communities in Uganda: Experiences, Impacts and Knowledges Workshop Series
Date: December 2021 – April 2023

Between December 2021 and April 2023 co-facilitated a series of 15 creative workshops involving over 150 participants to explore the lived experiences, perceptions and responses to climate change of sexual and gender diverse communities living in Uganda. A majority of these workshops were based in Kampala, the capital city.

Our workshops combined drawing and discussion and involved over 15 civil society organisations and artists led by (and serving) sexual and gender diverse communities as co-facilitators, hosts, and research partners. We adopted this approach to ensure we included as broad a scope of insights from across a wide and diverse community, and knowledge was not just co-produced with dominant organisations or key community figureheads.

To better understand how systemic and structural oppressions affect sexual and gender diverse people in different ways, GENERATE’s workshops deliberately sought to capture and highlight the diversity of the broader ‘community’ of sexual and gender diverse people in Kampala, while offering safe spaces for different communities to share their unique experiences individually and collectively.

Workshops focused on different – though often overlapping – parts of the community, such as transgender men, refugees and asylum-seekers, older people, sex workers, people with diffabilities, or those with experiences of incarceration.

Our research was co-designed and conducted in collaboration with the community itself. This allowed our workshops to reflect local priorities, build ownership, and resist and subvert historical and colonial power dynamics of research through adopting a collaborative methodology that enabled the community itself to determine what and how this research was produced and applied. This included shaping the questions that were asked, how we asked, and in the analysis and application of the knowledge produced.