Upcoming Events
Fifth Workshop: tba
April 10-12, 2025 @ University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Sixth Workshop: tba
Oct. 16-18, 2025 @ University of Zurich
Past Events
Fourth Workshop: Black Atlantic Affordances. Contested Memory Cultures
February 23-25, 2024 @ University of Texas at Austin
Guest Speakers:
Andrea-Vicky Amankwaa-Birago, HTW Berlin
Kelly Baker Josephs, University of Miami
Anthony Bogues, Brown University
Stefanie Bognitz, University of Johannesburg
Justin Dunnavant, University of California – Los Angeles
Ashley D. Farmer, University of Texas at Austin
Fazil Moradi, University of Johannesburg
Amani Morrison, Georgetown University
Nanjala Nyabola, independent
Angela Parker, Mercer University
Third Workshop: Forging Black Transatlantic Solidarities
July 19-21, 2023 @ University of Cologne (Germany)
Guest Speakers:
Quito Swan, Howard University, D. C.
Azziza Malanda, Decolonize Cologne
Jakub Galeziowski, University of Warsaw
Second Workshop: Ecologies in Black Liberation History – Religion – Activism
March 14-16, 2023 @ Amerikahaus Munich (Germany)
Guest Speakers:
Angela N. Parker, Mercer University, Atlanta, GA
Nathalie Eleyth, University of Bochum
Simon Wendt, University of Frankfurt
Our second workshop is generously supported by the DFG and the Bavarian American Academy.
This workshop seeks to theorize ecology as a wider critical field, encompassing questions of the natural world and human-made structures, as well as the sociopolitical, religious, and memorial architectures that both inhibit and enable Black liberation. Black freedom cannot be thought without the intersecting critical ecologies of presumed normalcy; without considering the structures and positions—built and metaphorical—that shape anti-Black racism and offer a point of attack for the struggle for Black liberation.
Locating racism in mundane everyday behaviors as well as recurring narratives, while focusing on feminist/womanist thought and abolition democracy, we propose to look at the frameworks that enable these practices to take hold and heighten their sociopolitical significance. Intersecting ecologies addressed range from understanding the term in the traditional sense, including questions of environmental justice, ecocriticism, and the differential distribution of precarity in climate change, to sociopolitical structures, religious, theological, and historical formations, as well as memorial and activist ecologies. We propose to look at processes of radical visualizing, restructuring, rereading, and recentering practices within the critical ecologies in contemporary movements for Black liberation and to articulate their implications in a global and transnational perspective.
Inaugural Workshop
June 10-12, 2022 @ University of Münster (Germany)
Guest Speaker: A Conversation with Heidi R. Lewis (co-author of In Audre’s Footsteps. Transnational Kitchen Table Talk, 2021)