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Date and Time

26th June 2020

Location

Online

Speakers and Artists
  • Gary Younge
  • Lola Olufemi

The term ‘reconstruction’ is often used to characterize a moment in time where a series of events force a period of political, social and economic reorganisation. This past year, the Covid-19 pandemic and the sustained Black Lives Matter protests have prompted a collective reassessment of the past in order to make sense of present-day inequalities. Stuart discussed ‘reconstruction’ as an opportunity to “reinscribe the past, reactivate it, relocate it and resignify it” in order to work through the present, reinterpret the future and to imagine something else. Our #reconstructionwork series implements Stuart’s thinking through a series of online public conversations where we invite writers, artists and activists to critically consider how we can build a better society in response to the Covid-19 crisis and the Black Lives Matter protests worldwide.

In the first of the series, you will meet writer and academic Gary Younge and black feminist writer, organiser and researcher Lola Olufemi.

The discussion will explore how the long 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 Programme here

Speakers and Artists

Gary Younge

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

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.