Telling Global LGBTQ+ Stories

Despite major progress for the rights of LGBTQ+ people around the world, acceptance of queer and transgender people in society remains sharply divided and influenced by regional culture. Join Pulitzer Center grantees Don Kevin Hapal, Mahmoud Hassino, Ankur Paliwal, and Ester Pinheiro for a webinar on their reporting of LGBTQ+ communities around the world. 

On Wednesday, June 21, 2023, at 10:00am EDT, panelists will discuss their reporting on queer communities in Brazil, India, the Philippines, and Turkey. The panel will also discuss how journalists protect the vulnerable communities they work with, how to incorporate data into narrative-driven work, as well as explore the similarities and differences in experiences between global LGBTQ+ communities. 

Panelists:

• Don Kevin Hapal is a journalist specializing in propaganda and disinformation research. His Pulitzer Center-supported project, PRIDE and Prejudice: Lies Hound the Philippines’ Queer Anti-Discrimination Bill, applied data forensics to investigate disinformation around legal protection against the abuse and discrimination of the Filipino queer community. He has written extensively about state-sponsored propaganda, disinformation, and red-tagging, the malicious blacklisting of individuals or organizations as communists or terrorists. 
• Presented by Mahmoud Hassino, the I Am Not Your Refugee podcast series looks at refugee-led projects, including a LGBTQ+ refugee network in Turkey. Hassino set up Syria’s first LGBTQ+ magazine, Mawaleh, and presented and produced a podcast series before he was forced to leave in 2011. 
• Ankur Paliwal’s project, Queer Lives in India, tells stories of the LGBTQ+ community living in a deeply homophobic and transphobic culture. Paliwal is an independent science journalist who has reported from India, Ethiopia, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Germany, and the United States for Scientific American, Nautilus, GQ, PBS, and several Indian news publications. 
• Ester Pinheiro is a Brazilian journalist; her Pulitzer Center-supported project, Beyond the Land of "Cordiality," highlights transgender and queer people living in Brazil, the country with the largest number of murdered trans people. Pinheiro produces the podcast Feminismos del Sur, which deepens and echoes the voices of women in Latin America.

Pulitzer Center Program Coordinator Mikaela Schmitt will moderate the conversation, followed by an audience Q&A. The webinar is free and open to the public, but registration is required.