Refusing Politics as Usual: Women of Color’s Radical Praxis in London and Amsterdam

The Power, Equity, and Diversity Proseminar in the Department of Political Science is excited to feature a talk from Professor Akwugo Emejulu of the University of Warwick.

This talk explores an intriguing emergent organizing strategy among women of color activists in London and Amsterdam: a politics of refusal. In response to the triple catastrophes facing women of color: the ongoing rollback of social welfare states, the normalization of the far-right in everyday life, and the xenophobic backlash against migrants, we find that some women of color activists are deliberatively withdrawing from view and working outside of dominant left activist spaces. Rather than demanding recognition and rights from institutional actors and supposed allies, many activists appeared to welcome and embrace their marginalization as this exclusion from mainstream life creates the possibility for alternative ways of doing politics and being political.