From April 10th to May 5th, 2023 ACES will be hosting Nana Osei-Kofi (Oregon State University) as the centre’s visiting scholar. Her current research as a critical feminist scholar centers on the experiences and conditions faced by people of African descent in Europe generally and Sweden specifically. This lecture is the third and final event during Nana Osei-Kofi's research visit. The lecture is open to the public.
Based on my forthcoming book, Identity and Kinship: AfroSwedish Places of Belonging, in this seminar I discuss Swedish online Black/Women of Color feminist spaces and the far-reaching role of social media sites in making the AfroSwedish condition visible to the public and advancing AfroSwedish coalitional identity formation and community building. Additionally, I engage with the ways in which the social media initiatives I discuss represent powerful, brave, critical, disruptive, contested, and at times disorienting projects of hope that attest to a belief in the possibility of another world, and a belief in the power of young AfroSwedish women, and all women of color, to take up space, and to demand change.
Nana Osei-Kofi is Professor of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. A critical feminist scholar, her current research centers on the experiences and conditions faced by people of African descent in Europe generally and Sweden specifically. As a leading scholar in the emerging field of AfroSwedish Studies, Osei-Kofi has published a wide range of articles and book chapters on the AfroSwedish condition and has a forthcoming single-authored book titled Identity and Kinship: AfroSwedish Places of Belonging.