LSE Public Lecture Programme - Akwugo Emejulu

Crisis Politics and the Challenge of Intersectional Solidarity
Akwugo Emejulu, University of Warwick

How might we transform the ways in which we think about ‘crisis’, ‘activism’ and 'solidarity'?

Drawing on my new co-authored book, Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain (Policy Press 2017), my talk explores the asymmetrical impacts of austerity measures on women of colour and their strategies for resistance in Scotland, England and France. Taking seriously women of colour’s anti-austerity activism makes visible the complex politics of solidarity in each country. As I will argue, because the dominant representations of both the 2008 crisis and austerity measures erase women of colour's experiences, this has a profound impact on the ability of women of colour activists to mobilise affective and material resources to combat their persistent precarity and to support their radical grassroots work.

That many women of colour activists insist on an intersectional analysis of the crisis and austerity and practice a politics that names interlocking forms of inequality – racism and gender inequality and poverty accentuated by the crisis – this represents a fundamental challenge to the prevailing logic of what constitutes a crisis and what counts as activism. I will argue, learning from the oftentimes dismissed and delegitimised activism of women of colour opens up new possibilities for rethinking solidarity and coalition politics in this unstable political moment.