BLACK PROTEST BLACK LIVES 

AND THE UNIVERSITY

A Transnational Conversation with

Verene Shepherd (Jamaica)  
Asanda Ngoasheng (South Africa)

Moderated by Océane Jasor

Monday February 22, 10:30am-noon (EST)
Zoom Registration: http://bit.ly/3tKqzMQ

Recent protests across the Black diaspora as well as critical challenges to the university as a colonial structure have been underpinned by a philosophical grounding in the discourse and demands of reparations. This conversation will take up questions of reparatory justice in relation to Black protest and the university. Our contributors will draw on their respective leadership in the Reparations Movement spearheaded by the University of the West Indies and the #FeesMustFall,#RhodesMustFall, and #DecolonisingTheCurriculum movements emerging from  South Africa. We will explore the challenges, provocations as well as the transformative possibilities of these movements to right historical injustices on both sides of the Atlantic.

Verene A. Shepherd, graduate of the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the University of Cambridge, is Professor Emerita of Social History at The UWI, is Director of the Centre for Reparation Research at the UWI, a published author of 7 books, a radio host and scholar activist, especially in the areas of women’s rights, human rights and reparatory justice. As a UN expert she has played a role in drafting the programme for the Decade for people of African descent and in the adoption of CERD General Recommendation 36 – “Preventing and Combatting Racial Profiling by Law Enforcement Officials. She has received several awards for her work in History, Human Rights and Gender. Her work around collective memorials for historical tragedies is well-known.

Asanda Ngoasheng is a racial and gender justice activist. She is a research associate at the University of Sussex’s Centre for Rights and Justice.  As a scholar -activist she has written journal articles and opinion pieces on the role of social justice in education. She has taught at the University of Witwatersrand and Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), both in South Africa. She is a conflict transformation practitioner who runs transformative workshops using storytelling to heal and affirm marginalised people in South Africa and beyond. Ngoasheng holds a Master’s in international Relations from the University of Witwatersrand.

Océane Jasor is a graduate of Florida International University and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. Prior to joining academia, she worked in development agencies broadly concerned with women’s empowerment and gender justice. Her research explores non-western and gendered responses to developmentalist discourses and global processes. Her current research investigates present-day feminist movements and discourses in South Africa, the African continent, and the African diaspora. Her work was published in Gender, Place & Culture, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. She is the recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Council (SSHRC) Insight Development grant and a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship to foster academic collaboration between Canada and West Africa.

With the support of ACCUTE (Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English)