UC EVENTS

From Black Lives Matter to EndSARS: Women’s Socio-Political Power and the Transnational Movement for Black Lives.

This seminar is an opportunity to discuss the piece ‘From Black Lives Matter to EndSARS: Women’s Socio-Political Power and the Transnational Movement for Black Lives’ published in Perspectives on Politics with the author Dr Pamela Nwakanma. The seminar will begin with a brief summary of the article from Dr Nwakanma, followed by an open discussion with the seminar participants. The abstract of the article is pasted below.

This seminar is moderated by Anne Jedzini.

About the speaker

Adaugo Pamela Nwakanma is a Leading Edge Fellow at the American Council for Learned Societies. Through this postdoctoral fellowship,?she serves as the research coordinator for the project on Decolonizing Democracy at People Powered. She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Government with a secondary field in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University in 2022.

About the paper

‘From Black Lives Matter to EndSARS: Women’s Socio-Political Power and the Transnational Movement for Black Lives’ was published in Perspectives in Politics in 2022.

The relationship between Black Lives Matter (BLM) and anti-police brutality movements abroad reveals the variety of ways in which Black feminist theories of justice have taken root in public discourse. The EndSARS movement in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and the world’s largest Black nation, illustrates the influence of BLM transnationally and some of the continuities and discontinuities between anti-police brutality movements across contexts. I examine these two movements in tandem and develop a theory of political behaviour that builds on transnational Black and African feminist insights. More specifically, I consider how Black feminist articulations of intersectionality, personal politics, and Black liberation have informed the language and organizational praxis of two of the largest anti-police brutality movements to have taken place in the midst of a global pandemic. Here, I argue that organizers, many of whom were women, leveraged social power, in the form of embeddedness in politically active communities, to effectively organize protests and demand for justice. Through this comparative analysis, I contribute substantively to our understanding of how social power engenders political empowerment for individuals and communities in spite of patriarchal systems of exclusion. Read the full article here.