Intersectional Vulnerabilities and the Banality of Harm: The Dangerous Desires of Women of Color Activists
Tuesday, December 7, 2021
8:00 am – 9:30 am EST/GMT-5 Online Event
8 am New York l 2 pm Vienna
The OSUN project on Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice at Bard College Berlin welcomes all OSUN members to a talk by Akwugo Emejulu, who will examine how "intersectional vulnerabilities" are experienced and made sense of by women of color activists in Europe.
She names intersectional vulnerabilities as a broad, sometimes contradictory, set of emotions, all tied to activists’ complex experiences of insecurity and community. Intersectional vulnerabilities are those risks and rewards that are derived from positioning in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and legal status, which shape the possibilities of women of color’s activist labor.
These vulnerabilities are Janus-faced, in that they are experienced as social harms that oftentimes lead to community. Prof. Emejulu attempts to grapple with the bittersweetness of vulnerability and how the banality of harms meted out to women of color nevertheless contain the seeds of resistance, solidarity, and self-love.
Akwugo Emejulu is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Her research interests include the political sociology of race, class and gender, and women of color's grassroots activism in Europe and the United States. She is the author of several books including Fugitive Feminism (Silver Press, forthcoming) and Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain (Policy Press, 2017). She is co-editor of To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (Pluto Press, 2019).
This is an online event. Join via Zoom.
Website: https://bard.zoom.us/j/89646483937?pwd=azJOakFPVUVlc1NBZE4wQzFFRDNEZz09