Borders, Havens and Digital Spaces for Resistance: Black feminist lives in autoethnographic research

When: 07 July 2026, 10:00 — 16:00
Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

Womanism, Activism, Higher Education Research Network

Do you have an interest in Autoethnographic research and social justice?

Conference title: Borders, Havens and Digital Spaces for Resistance: Black feminist lives in autoethnographic research

What is the future of radical spaces for Black women's activism?

Keynote speakers: Professor Geniece Crawford Mondé (Furman University, USA), Professor Ebonie Cunningham Stringer (Penn State University, USA), Dr Jan Etienne (Birkbeck University of London, UK)

About the conference

This one-day conference will celebrate the changing nature of diverse spaces for resistance in the activist lives of Black women. It will showcase the legacy of radical spaces for resistance across the African Diaspora. Where are these spaces in contemporary social life and how are such spaces impacting Black women in higher education? The conference will bring together researchers, poets, artists, community champions and activist scholars across intergenerational, transnational spaces of activism. It will share lived experiences, good research practice and address the value of Black women's collaboration in autoethnographic spaces for resistance.

The conference will engage with autoethnographic stories of activism, from the living room table, to the high street, in places of worship, community and faith-based centres, day to day work, social, cultural lives, as well as in online, social media platforms of resistance.

Conference Abstracts, Speakers and Biographies – 7th July 2026

Abstract 1

Abiodun Abdul

Intercontinental Childhoods and Self-Generated Black Feminist Resistance: Unravelling Complex Narratives through Hybrid Life Writing & Autoethnography

This interdisciplinary doctorate research looks at how racism affects isolated Black women and girls in low diversity regions with minimal multiculturalism, surviving within a microcosm of self-generated Black feminist resistance. Through hybrid life writing, the research focuses on my unique experiences as a Yorùbá-Nigerian secondary school student in mainly hostile Scots-Britain (physical, verbal and mental attacks) and then mainly welcoming Japan, mixing culture-hopping narratives with factual insights into psychosocial contexts to this complex life journey. Through autoethnographic storytelling, the research embodies multiple aspects of Black feminist theory including Kimberle Crenshaw's intersectionality (overlapping positionalities) as well as Deborah K. King's multiple jeopardy (amplified oppression), a conduit to foreground tacit knowledge and bypass epistemological racism which can have a decolonising effect.

However, Ellis et al (2011) state autoethnography is often met with pushback from ethnographers and sociologists, claiming it's 'too artful', criticising the potential bias of personal experiences as a sole data source. Similarly, creative writers have claimed my autoethnographic writings are 'too scientific', criticising academic features including data storytelling visuals/diagrams for jolting the reader 'out of the narrative'. Yet reading focus groups at various stages of my research contradict both streams of criticism by consistently giving positive feedback on this niche storytelling delivery. This paper therefore explores the opportunities and limits of the principal autoethnography genre and how foregrounding marginalised Black female lived experiences enriches the discussion of Black feminist resistance.

Biography

Abíọ́dún Abdul is a Critical Creative PhD Researcher using autoethnography to capture how racism affects Black lives in low-diversity regions, encompassing her schooling across Yorùbá-Nigeria, Scots-Britain and Japan (through a Japanese Government secondary-school scholarship). Book 1 is nearing publication and Book 2 comprises her doctorate funded by a UoN Faculty of Arts Scholarship.

Abstract 2

Yasmin Adan

The Living Room Table: Somali Womanist conversations of resistance

This research paper considers how Black Feminist Thought (Collins, 2000) can be foundational when analysing autoethnographic conversations of resistance and placing the lived realities of Somali women centre stage as they strive to push boundaries in Womanist conversations of resistance.

What is the nature of these conversations? What do they reveal?

Largely underrepresented, Somali women occupy an intersectional space as both Black and Muslim. Building on my own Black feminist postgraduate research and collaborative work in theorising Black feminist practice in studies such as Decolonising for Social Justice (Etienne, Adan and Douglas, 2025) I acknowledge that for Somali women, 'there is no formal space to freely facilitate Black feminist discussion' (2025:157). I reflect on the Living Room table as a space for resistance and giving meaning to autoethnographic Somali womanist conversations as presented by a first-generation, Somali immigrant and female educator.

My autoethnography examines the ways in which Somali women resist impositions on their identities and sense of self by way of 'writing themselves in' (Octavier, E Butler, 2000) to the collective consciousness. Through narrative storytelling, our hopes, dreams and aspirations become known (Walker, 1990). Overwhelmingly, social change and activist work is identified as confrontational (Collins, 1990), a stance that results in the erasure and martyrdom of Black women's position in social justice activism. Autoethnography becomes, then, not only a tool to describe and analyse the cultural experience of Somali Women but an opportunity for creation and self-actualisation. The paper summarises the ways in which self-identity exposed in autoethnographic work propels Somali women in finding ways to fight back and overcome

Biography

Yasmin is an English teacher, social justice scholar and prospective PhD candidate. Her postgraduate research engages with the activism of Black female teachers. She has an MSc in Education, Power and Social Change from Birkbeck, University of London, and a BA in English Literature from Queen Mary, University of London.

Abstract 3

Maria-Luisa Ndong Asue

Poetic autoethnography "We Were Always Here": Presencing, Black looks, and ordinary resistance

What forms can resistance take when they are quiet, ordinary, and lived behind closed doors? This paper invites the audience to think alongside one possible answer, drawn from the experience of growing up as part of the only Black family in a small, predominantly white town in rural Galicia, Spain.

At the centre of this work is a distinction between two kinds of looking. Outside the home, the look surveils: it fixes, racialises, renders Black presence strange or invisible. Inside, the look does something else entirely. It cares. It recognises. It sustains. Drawing on bell hooks' theorisations of homeplace as a site of resistance and black looks, Gail Lewis's concept of 'presencing', and Édouard Glissant's poetics of relation and opacity, this paper examines how the caring look, captured in family photographs and transmitted through gesture and the quiet hum of everyday household life, constitutes a diasporic womanist space of resistance – one that does not announce itself but persists across generations. Poetic autoethnography, through photograph-poem pairings, is both method and form – dwelling in the fragmented, the unsaid, the half-spoken, where Black existence lives. The poems are how the knowledge takes shape, giving form to what Dionne Brand calls making Blackness "the thought and not the unthought."

This paper presents understandings of poetic autoethnography and asks: Through what forms can resistance take shape? And what becomes possible when Black diasporic life, in all its ordinariness, is centred as the starting point of inquiry?

Biography:

Maria-Luisa Ndong Asue is a UBEL-ESRC-funded PhD candidate in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research examines race, racialisation, and diasporic memory in Europe, interrogating colonial legacies and the illegibility of Black European experiences. She combines ethnography, autoethnography, poetic inquiry, and visual analysis to centre alternative epistemologies at the intersections of postcolonial and diaspora scholarship.

Abstract 4

Sabrina Bowen

Solidarity and resistance: Borders, policing, asylum, immigration, refugee status and womanist, spaces for resistance

This paper examines how demands for reparations have shaped contemporary discourses surrounding justice, identity and accountability across the African diaspora, with particular attention to womanist spaces of solidarity and resistance. Drawing on the work of Black feminist and Caribbean scholars including Sylvia Wynter, Stella Dadzie and Patricia Hill Collins, the paper explores how reparations activism challenges the ongoing colonial logics embedded within borders, policing, migration systems and racialised state violence. It further engages the work of Hilary Beckles, Audre Lorde and Claudia Jones to examine the gendered dimensions of diaspora activism, resistance, displacement and belonging within Black transnational communities.

Focusing specifically on CARICOM's Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice, this paper assesses its significance and reception amongst Caribbean diasporic communities, particularly Black Caribbean women in the UK who maintain close cultural, emotional, and political ties to the Caribbean. Through the perspectives of scholars such as bell hooks, Angela Davis and Hazel Carby, the paper highlights how Black women shape transnational dialogues around historical injustice, migration, citizenship and collective accountability while creating womanist spaces of resistance against the enduring effects of slavery, imperialism and exclusionary immigration regimes.

By linking historical dispossession to contemporary experiences of border control, asylum politics, unequal citizenship and racial policing, the paper argues that reparations activism functions as both a political demand and a transnational practice of solidarity, healing, and Black diasporic resistance. In doing so, it positions reparatory justice movements as critical womanist spaces through which Black diasporic communities contest colonial power structures and reimagine collective futures grounded in justice, liberation and global accountability.

Biography:

Sabrina is a 4th year PhD student in the Department of Geography, Environmental Sciences and Development Studies at Birkbeck University of London. Her research focuses on transnational practices and identity formations of the UK-based Caribbean Diaspora through an inter-generational lens. She is a Research Assistant at Birkbeck University, researching widening participation in Higher Education.

Abstract 5

Nataliah Douglas

Spaces for resistance in health care: Experiences of Black girls and women

While it can be argued that healthcare is inherently misogynistic, the experiences of Black girls and women highlight further disparities in advocacy and access to public health services. As a result, Black girls and women are inadvertently engaging in resistance. There are many factors that contribute to this, as a by-product of postmodernity. However, where mainstream Feminism would point to advancements in technology, the resistance demonstrated by Black girls and women remain connected to cultural practice. To tackle this nuanced discourse, this paper builds on concepts studied by Avtar Brah on diaspora studies and healthcare (1996, 2004) where the significance of cultural practice and teachings of the diaspora, shape our methods of resistance. This paper applies Kimberle Crenshaw's theory on intersectionality (1989) to bridge the gap between post- colonial thought and Black girls and women navigating superstructures. Additionally, Dr Jenny Douglas' research on Black women's activism and public health in the UK (2019) is used as comparative literature, exploring the extent to which resistance has evolved from formal community activism to post- structural resistance. Autoethnographic research will amplify the experiences of Black girls and women in health care, homing in on menstrual/ reproductive health. Ultimately, the paper seeks to inform research involving professional and grassroot communities engaged in reflections on lived experiences, contributing to healthcare activism.

Biography:

Nataliah Douglas is a Social Sciences educator and Specialist SEND Advisor. Her work is influenced by research amplifying lived experiences, following guidance from Black Womanism, as shown in Feminist Scholars' Experiences in Decolonising the Academy: Race, Class, and Identity in Narrative. She is a Birkbeck MRes Graduate.

Abstract 6

Sharon Frazer

The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Masters House: Autoethnographic Reflections on Affective Survival and the Hidden Labour of Black and Brown Women in Psychotherapy Training

This paper builds on emerging findings from doctoral research exploring the lived experiences of analytically trained psychotherapists racialised as Black and Brown within the UK psychotherapy profession. Set against a backdrop where Black and Brown women are disproportionately affected by mental distress, less likely to be referred for psychological therapies, and underrepresented within the profession itself, the paper speaks to urgent gaps across both clinical practice and higher education.

Drawing on narrative interviews, literature, and my own experience of training, the paper uses an autoethnographic, Black feminist approach to summarise the incidents, events and institutional dynamics practitioners must navigate within counselling centres of excellence. These include barriers to entry, racial isolation, emotional masking and the ongoing management of race-related encounters. Such experiences are understood as part of a broader continuity, where colonial systems and structures persist in shaping contemporary training environments and emotional life. Extending the work of bell hooks and Audre Lorde, the paper foregrounds the lesser explored terrain of affect, feelings and emotion–offering insight into internal worlds, survival strategies, resilience, and the often-unseen emotional labour required to endure, remain and retain cultural identity. In dialogue with Black feminist commitments to resistance and transformation, the paper considers how Black and Brown trainees might be better supported to survive and thrive. The research not only highlights the value of Black women's collaboration in autoethnographic spaces for resistance but positions it as essential for survival, for change, and for movement towards liberation.

Biography

Sharon Frazer-Carroll is a Black British psychodynamic psychotherapist, supervisor and educator working at the intersection of clinical practice, vocational training and higher education. Previously Staff Tutor at the Open University, Programme Director at Birkbeck University and Ofqual EDI Advisor she is committed to creating spaces that m

Contact name: Jan Etienne

Contact phone: 07956510183

Speakers

Dr Jan Etienne —

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