During the spring semester of 2024, the Centre held its first anti-racist seminar series. This three-part series emerged after PGRs and community partners called for more opportunities to platform their work, exchange ideas, and draw attention to issues that are often overlooked in academic spaces.
1. In The Cut: celebrating the Black barbershop as a space for healing
The barbershop has been a staple of Black communites in Britain for over 50 years. Not only as a place to get a cut, but also as an essential site of respite and repair. Utilising such spaces to negotiate trauma and oppression are culturally implicit and are not considered conventional ways of healing.
On the 14th March, we held an online event to unpack and champion the specific ways in which the Black barbershop positively impacts the mental and physical health of its users and wider community.
Three short talks showcased projects (from London and Sheffield) that are currently exploring and supporting the barbershop’s role in fostering healing and learning, particularly for Black men. Dr Karis Campion, Donald McLean and Mac Lannaman share academic research, experiences in education and social care, and personal testimony to collectively frame the barbershop as a space where people come together, share knowledge, archive Black culture, find support, build resilience, and work towards collective liberation.
Featured Projects:
Black Barbershops in Focus (London). An exploration of how black-owned barbershops function as community assets in their localities. With a primary focus on Brixton/Herne Hill, the project uses ethnography, art and photography to capture the importance of Black barbershops through different perspectives.
Black Male Barbers Project (Sheffield) This project equips and support local Black Barbers to spot the signs of men who may not be coping as well as they could, or would like and provide information with regard to support available from SACMHA and other partners.
In The Cut (Sheffield): A celebration of the Black barbershop as a space for healing. This collaboration between the Centre for Equity & Inclusion and Macole Lannaman seeks to highlight the relationship between barbershops, masculinity and mental health.
2. Confronting the Colonial Grip on Africa's Resources
On May 15th 2024 we examined the way colonial power dynamics continue to exploit Africa’s natural resources, with a specific focus on conservation and water. Two provocations on this topic were provided by Kenyan academics Dr Mordecai Ogada and Tete’ Mausse. Together they outlined how specific colonial ideas and structures continue to function, how they are reinforced by western institutions including universities, and what needs to change going forward.
Dr Mordecai Ogada abstract
We currently have concurrent narratives of decolonization, inclusion, diversity, African voices, etc. These are being cultivated by western Academia and institutions in order to polish their reputations. This thematic field grew from an external need to understand and package the continent and its resources into quanta that could be extracted, controlled and otherwise exploited. This need still persists as illustrated by the presence of “Africanists” in many western educational institutions. The field of conservation presents us with an opportunity to re-think our cultural and anthropological spaces in addition to our natural heritage. I present, from an indigenous Kenyan scholar’s perspective, an examination of the way in which our natural resources and heritage is currently perceived, studied, and consumed by the rest of the world. The frame through which our heritage is viewed by the west must expand beyond the boundaries of what they find ‘interesting’, ‘cute’, useful or convenient about us. Otherwise, it is merely a basis for prejudice and destruction.
Tete’ Mausse abstract
Having access to portable and clean water is a basic human requisite and common good development indicator. Historically in sub-Saharan Africa, accessible water provision was an identity politics freedom. Today as Africa ‘enjoys’ its independence, “the statistics show that contemporary Africa reflects the state of affairs at the end of colonialism “(Rodney, 2018). Water access and all its compounds identically continue to be a positionality privilege, but one of status and not merely class. A circumstance of the haves and the have nots. This continual resource divide warrants a good understanding of both the historical and contemporary practices that have shaped, re-regenerated and expanded what is emerging as the present-day water divide.