Gary Younge and Lola Olufemi discuss ‘looking back to look forward’. In the first #ReconstructionWork conversation, writer and academic Gary Younge and black feminist writer, organiser and researcher Lola Olufemi explored how histories of black cultural and political activism can help us construct just and equal futures, working across different generations and geographies.

Learn more about our #ReconstructionWork project here.

Speakers:

Gary Younge is an award-winning journalist, author and professor of sociology at Manchester University.  He has written five books, most recently Another Day in the Death of America, which was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize from Columbia Journalism School and Nieman Foundation. Gary worked for The Guardian for 26 years where he was a columnist and the US correspondent for 12 years, returning to become the paper’s editor-at-large and leaving for Manchester University in April 2020. He is also the Alfred Knobler Fellow for Type Media and on the editorial board of The Nation in the US.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer, organiser and researcher from London. She holds an undergraduate degree in English Literature from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship with futurity. She is co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University (2019), author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020), a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective and the recipient of the techne AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership between The Stuart Hall Foundation, CREAM and Westminster School of Arts.

“We are living through a period of profound political instability, in which old paradigms are crumbling, and new ones struggling to be born. At this moment of both possibility and danger, what does ‘resistance’ look like to those seeking it on the ground, and what exactly are the forces ranged against them?”  – Jack Shenker.

The 3^rd Stuart Hall Public Conversation pursued the theme of Resistance through multiple lenses, providing a chance for questions and discussion, and punctuated with interventions and perspectives from a new generation of artists, scholars and cultural activists.

The event was introduced by the Stuart Hall Foundation’s new Executive Director Ruth Borthwick, who welcomed multidisciplinary artist and designer Bahia Shehab to deliver the opening presentation.

Journalist and author Jack Shenker took to the stage for a keynote speech. Drawing on his deep reporting on grassroots movements in different parts of the world over recent years, Jack told the story of two young people several thousand miles apart – one in Manchester, England, another in Cairo, Egypt – to explore how the children of the financial crisis are fighting to widen their political imaginations, and often paying a heavy price in return.