2nd Annual Black Feminism, Womanism and the Politics of Women of Color in Europe conference

In 2016, my co-organizer Tracian Meikle and I traveled to Edinburgh for the first edition of the Black Feminism, Womanism and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe conference. We were there to present a paper about what we'd been building with Amsterdam Black Women — our community, our methods, our why.

Akwugo Emejulu, the feminist scholar and professor who convened the conference, heard us and invited us to bring the second edition to Amsterdam. We said yes.

We put out an open call for papers and received dozens of abstracts from researchers, activists, and artists across Europe and North America. We read them all. We organized them into themes — digital diasporas, public space, knowledge production, activism, sex and the body — and built a full-day programme around them. We chaired sessions. We held the room.

What made this gathering matter — especially in a European context — was what it centered: the politics, sexualities, and needs of feminists of colour, in all their intergenerational, multilingual, multicultural complexity. These kinds of spaces are rare here. People arrived curious and left activated.

→ Read the conference programme and reflections from participants