Peter Tatchell heads line-up at equality conference

Veteran human rights campaigner, Peter Tatchell, will speak at a conference organised by Edge Hill's Centre for Local Policy Studies (CLPS). The three-day event will take place at Crewe Hall, Cheshire, from Tuesday, 30 June, until Thursday, 2 July, 2009.

At the event the award-winning Guardian columnist Gary Younge and the author, journalist and political commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown will head a programme of leading speakers on equality and diversity, multi-culturalism and community cohesion.

Earlier this week Peter Tatchell, a campaigner for human rights for over 40 years, was a member of a peaceful group who were attacked in Moscow while trying to present a petition asking Moscow's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, to lift a ban on a Gay Pride parade.

Tatchell, voted the sixth greatest ‘Hero of our Time' by readers of the New Statesman in 2006, was arrested and later released.

Speaking alongside Peter Tatchell at the conference will be Guardian columnist Gary Younge. Based in New York, Gary has written extensively from the United States, South Africa and throughout Europe during the 15 years he has worked at the paper. He writes for Nation magazine and is the Belle Zeller Visiting Professor of Social Policy and Public Administration at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

He has presented several television and radio documentaries and also written for The Observer, Gay Times, the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the Los Angeles Times, the Evening Standard, Hello! and GQ Style. In 1996 he was seconded to the Washington Post after being awarded the Lawrence Stern fellowship.

Born and raised in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, he studied French and Russian at Heriot-Watt University and taught English to refugees in Sudan. His most recent book is Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States and he is also the author of No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's journey through the Deep South.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a journalist who has written for The Guardian, Observer, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Evening Standard, The Daily Mail and is now a regular columnist on The Independent and London's Evening Standard. She is a radio and television broadcaster and author of several books. Her book, No Place Like Home, was an autobiographical account of a twice removed immigrant.

From 1996 to 2001 she was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research which published True Colours on the role of government on racial attitudes. In April 2004, her film on Islam for Channel 4 won an award and in May 2004, she received the EMMA award for best print journalist for her columns in the Independent. In September 2004, a collection of her journalistic writings, Some of My Best Friends Are... was published in 2005.

She has staged in her one woman show, commissioned and directed by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of their new work festival. In 2005, she was voted the 10th most influential black/Asian woman in the country in a poll and in another she was among the most powerful Asian media professionals in the UK.

In 2008 she was appointed Visiting Professor of Journalism at Cardiff University School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies and Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln. Yasmin's latest release, The Settler's Cookbook, A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food, tells the history of the Indian migration to the UK, via East Africa.

CLPS, a leading centre for work on equality and diversity was responsible for instigating the successful visit by civil rights campaigner Rev Jesse Jackson. During the free event, Rev Jackson delivered a powerful address to an audience of over 850 people.

For more information or to book a place at the CLPS conference, please go to http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/clps/events.