Stories, Letters, and Laughter: Black Feminist Activism and Community Building at ‘Elite’ British and American Universities

• In Event: Navigating Digital Media Analysis in Multi-Sited Justice Seeking Research

Proposal

My doctoral research invokes storytelling as a conceptual backdrop to explore Black feminist activism and community building at two ‘elite’ universities: the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, England) and Howard University (Washington D.C., United States of America). Living in a white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1984), my research begins with the understanding that institutions are microcosms of the various social violences we confront as we move through the world - white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and cisheteronormativity, alongside other oppressive forces. Within institutions, such as the university, those of us deemed abject through processes of racialisation and gendering are pushed to the margins, “part of the whole but outside of the main body” (hooks, 1984). Furthermore, for those of us who possess intersectional vulnerabilities, there is the risk of us experiencing a form of ‘secondary marginalization’ (Cohen, 1999), a further peripheralization within our own communities. It is from these margins that resistance is born, and activism becomes a means through which to transform the main body for many of us.

Thus, this project investigates the ways that Black women within these institutions embody resistance along racialised, gendered, sexualised and classed lines, by employing rage, love, and pleasure as tools for mobilisation. Understanding the multifaceted nature of the Black feminist project, which Jennifer C. Nash (2018) reminds us are “theoretical, political, activist, intellectual, erotic, ethical and creative” (p.5), the Black feminist ethos runs through my entire approach to elements to this PhD. I employ a constellation of methods, primarily letter-writing and sista circle workshops in order to conduct this interdisciplinary research which sits at the intersection of Black Studies, Higher Education Studies and Feminist Studies. This work serves as a means to reimagine community building, activist and transformative work within the university. The promise of Black feminism is dismantling all violent systems that affect our lives and relegate so many of us to the margins. The goal may not necessarily be to escape the margins but to foster them for what they truly are: spaces of rage, love, desire, transformation, resistance, and hope.

Author

• Tyra Edwina Amofah-Akardom, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge