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Tracing My History

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  • Free
  • Discussion
  • British Sign Language interpreted
  • Speech-to-text
  • Relaxed
Photograph of a seated audience at an event in the Reading Room at Wellcome Collection. At the front of the room a panel of 3 speakers are seated facing the audience with microphones, a BSL translator is standing on the stage.
Reading Room event at Wellcome Collection, Photo: Kathleen Arundell. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

What you’ll do

Join educator and facilitator F. Zeeshan Choudhury in conversation with artist, author and activist Chris North to explore how lived experience and creative storytelling shapes the way we understand individual and collective histories.

Chris discovered he was intersex as an adult, a moment that led him to revisit his childhood medical records and question the story that had been written about him by others. His memoir, told through words and illustrations, reflects on identity, secrecy, medicalisation and the process of piecing together a past.

In this conversation, Chris will share how this journey shaped his creative practice, including his use of graphic storytelling. Together, we’ll consider how personal narratives can challenge medicalised frameworks, and why this matters in research.

After the conversation, we'll explore creative approaches to autobiographical storytelling, including drawing, storyboarding and collage.

There will be an opportunity for audience participation. You can listen, ask questions or share your thoughts – whatever feels right for you.

If you want a break from the activities, you can head to our Chill-Out Room to lie down or relax. There will be low lighting, comfortable seating, cushions, mats, ear defenders, earplugs and sensory toys.

Content note: This event includes references to traumatic childhood medical experiences and historical medical language.

Dates

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Tickets via Eventbrite

Need to know

Location

We’ll be in the Reading Room on level 2. You can walk up the spiral staircase to the Reading Room door, or take the lift up and then head left from the Library Desk.

Place not guaranteed

Booking a ticket for a free, in-person event does not guarantee you a place. You should aim to arrive 15 minutes before the event is scheduled to start to claim your place. If you do not arrive on time, your place may be given to someone on the waiting list.

Waiting list

If this event is fully booked, you may still be able to attend. We will operate a waiting list, which opens 30 minutes before this event starts. Arrive early, and we’ll give you a numbered ticket. If there are any unfilled places just before the start time, we will invite you to enter in order of ticket number.

British Sign Language interpreted

This event will have British Sign Language interpretation.

Speech-to-text

This event will be live-transcribed. The captions will be displayed on a screen in-venue.

Relaxed

This is a relaxed event. You are welcome to move freely around the space. You can leave and re-enter whenever you wish, and you can make noise at any time.

For more information, please visit our Accessibility page. If you have any queries about accessibility, please email us at access@wellcomecollection.org or call 0 2 0. 7 6 1 1. 2 2 2 2

Our event terms and conditions

About your contributors

A person with long dark hair wearing a dark top is photographed in front of a softly lit golden curtain background. They are faintly smiling and looking to camera.

F. Zeeshan Choudhury

Facilitator

F is a facilitator who uses creativity to foster radical wellbeing. Her research and practice finds meaningful ways for people to question injustice and imagine new futures. She is an advocate for hyper-local community engagement, and runs community groups in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, including the Writer’s Circle at The Common Press in Shoreditch, and Writing to Uncover The Self at St. Margaret’s House in Bethnal Green. Her latest project, Forming New Folklores, imagined new ways of cross-cultural storytelling between the UK and Bangladesh. 

Black and white, head and shoulders photographic portrait of Chris North.

Chris North

Speaker

Chris is an author, independent scholar, creative arts facilitator, intersex advocate and activist. He’s been a teacher, social and community worker and is now a storyteller. He shares his powerful personal experience to provide much needed “lived historical intersex testimony” and works hard for other minorities and those marginalised by society.

Photo of Michelle Wood

Michelle Wood

British Sign Language interpreter

Michelle has been a qualified British Sign Language Interpreter for over 20 years and has been working with the Wellcome Collection for the last 10 years. She loves being a small part of the team who ensure that the Deaf Community have full access to what, in her view, is one of the best places in London. NRCPD registration number 1009790.

Karen Houlihan

British Sign Language interpreter

NRCPD registration number 100738X.