Healing Justice and the Wake of Global Anti-Blackness

Following the speed of catastrophe in 2020, it’s even more important for us to work towards a healing justice that reckons with anti-Black harm and violence, and that confronts our ‘past that is not past’ (Christina Sharpe, In The Wake). Join us as we discuss and imagine healing justice rooted in Black Liberation and feminisms.

This roundtable is about coming together to orientate ourselves towards a different reality; it’s about working together across multiple conceptions of healing and racial (in)justice.

“And while the wake produces Black death and trauma – ‘violence … precedes and exceeds Blacks’ – we, Black people everywhere and anywhere we are, still produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing: we insist Black being into the wake” Christina Sharpe, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being

MONDAY 21st SEPT, 6-8pm BST (1-3pm ET)

SPEAKERS:

Dr Azeezat Johnson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her current project unpacks the racial histories that inform Black Muslim women’s current lives in London. She asks how Black Muslim women in London create (and embody) practices of home while navigating the imperial nostalgia and racism exposed through Brexit. She is also the co-editor of The Fire Now: anti-racist scholarship in times of explicit racial violence (2018, Zed Books)

Nkem Ndefo is the founder and president of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit, a model that promotes embodied self-awareness and self-regulation in an ecologically sensitive framework and social justice context. Licensed as a nurse midwife, Nkem also has extensive post-graduate training in complementary health modalities and emotional therapies. She brings an abundance of experience as a clinician, educator, consultant, and community strategist to innovative programs that address stress and trauma and build resilience for individuals, organizations, and communities across sectors, both in her home country (USA) and internationally. Nkem is particularly interested in working alongside people most impacted by violence and marginalization.

Rabiah Mali is a qualified Medical Herbalist, Creative and Community Healer and the founder of Black Muslim Women Healing Collective. She also set up The Herbal Blessing clinic in 2015 , a sliding scale community clinic with the intentions of ‘reconnecting’ the community with their inner herbalist. Offering consultations, workshops, retreats and walks and holistic therapy that is rooted in a traditional and spiritual plant-based healing. Her work involves the use of nature and local plant-based knowledge to nourish a feeling of home in communities where poverty, poor health access and gentrification has fractured the sense of belonging.

She is also co-founder of the Green Deen Tribe in 2017 which responded to the need to heal the wounds of separation and lack of access to nature by Muslim Women, which is all too often rooted in colonisation, racism, other socioeconomic factors and Islamophobia. The tribe has since grown into a community of intergenerational women who advocate for change in their homes and wider community. Recently a deeper exploration of the relationship between racial and environmental injustice has planted new seeds of action in the group, who are primarily women of colour.

Camille Barton (they/them) is an artist, writer and somatic educator, working on the intersections of wellness, drug policy and transformative justice. Camille is the director of the Collective Liberation Project, and the creator of a trauma informed approach to diversity and decolonization work that centres the body and lived experience. Camille offers Embodied Social Change – movement sessions that fuse somatics and partner work to explore how oppression, such as racism and ableism, is rooted in the body; and how we can re-pattern it using mindful attention and movement.

Camille is currently researching grief on behalf of the Global Environments Network, creating a tool kit of embodied grief practices to support efforts for intersectional ecological justice. They also work as an advisor for MAPS, ensuring that MDMA psychotherapy will be accessible to global majority communities (POC), most harmed by the war on drugs.

Dr Cheryl Grills is a Clinical Psychologist with a current emphasis in Community Psychology. A national Past President of the Association of Black Psychologists, she is a tenured, Full Professor of Psychology at Loyola Marymount University and Director of its’ Psychology Applied Research Center. Dr Grills is also the Founder and Executive Director of Imoyase Community Support Services, a 30-year non-profit organization providing action research, program evaluation and strategic technical assistance to social justice and social service community-based organizations. Dr Grills currently serves as a Commissioner and Chair of the Los Angeles County Sybil Brand Commission which addresses conditions and practices within LA County adult jails. She was Co-Executive Director of the County’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Child Protection which led to important changes in the LA County child welfare system. In her leadership in the Association of Black Psychologists, Dr. Grills co-designed the Emotional Emancipation (EE) Circles community self-help model established by The Community Healing Network and is the leader of the EE Circles Training Team. She trains people of African ancestry around the world to facilitate healing circles that address the stress and trauma associated with anti-Black racism. Her research interests, publications, and projects include African Psychology, prevention and treatment in mental health with African Americans, community mental health, and applied research with community-based organizations engaged in community organizing on a host of social justice issues.

Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson is a multi-disciplinary artist and community healer: performance-maker, writer, facilitator and embodied social justice arts educator/organiser. Envisioning and manifesting freedom one project, workshop and ritual at a time. Lateisha draws upon the powerful interconnections of Afro-diasporic spirituality, queerness and Earth justice to facilitate transformative, imaginative and galvanising healing spaces towards liberation. Lateisha positions their art within decolonial movement building, activating necessary healing tools for Black folk and communities othered and marginalised by oppression to restore agency through deep connection to self, each other and the land.

Working across grassroots and venue-based organisations, including; Healing Justice LDN Black community healing circles, Misery Meets QTBPOC Black Sancturary, and artist-residencies at Camden Art Centre education department. Lateisha is also developing their own project space called HIT THE GROUND, currently working on theatre piece ‘S/He Breathe/S’’ an afro futurist storytelling work set to change the course of our polluted colonised world. Last year Lateisha designed, produced and facilitated a Live Art Development Agency ‘DIY’: a 3 day artist retreat called ‘To The Ritual Knowledge of Remembering’, exploring body, memory, place, land and story – how ritual and remembering are tools for reclaiming ancestral ways of being.

This is an online event and we will send link out prior to event. It will be recorded , transcribed with BSL. Please contact us for further access needs. Info@healingjusticeldn.org

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ALT [ Image Blue Background with six images of each speaker, Healing Justice Logo. Text Reads Healing Justice and the Wake of Global Anti-Blackness . A discussion with speakers detailed above. Free & open to all]