On December 15, 2021, bell hooks passed away at the age of 69. A university professor, intellectual, feminist, poetess, and iconic figure of Black Feminism, one of hooks’ most important contributions was transforming love into a critical axis for emancipatory research and praxis. Throughout her prolific career, she tirelessly reminded us that love should be at the center of our struggles and practices if we truly want to combat paradigms of exploitation and domination. “Simply being a victim does not radicalize your consciousness.” These words of bell hooks demonstrate the extent to which her theoretical work was dedicated to repairing harm and violence.

This graduate roundtable will focus on how bell hooks contribution lives on in our academic work, in the organizations that draw on her work, in our attempts to turn community education into a tool for radical change.

Roundtable Discussants:

Rebecca A. Wilcox (Princeton Theological Seminary) is a Ph.D. student at Princeton Theological Seminary concentrating in Religion and Society. Her research explores the hauntings of Black, radical, epistemologies honed out of underground economies.

Chrystel Oloukoï (Harvard University) is pursuing a PhD in African and African American Studies with secondary fields in Women, Gender and Sexuality as well as Critical Media Practice at Harvard University. Her dissertation focuses on imaginations of the night in Lagos, as well as the afterlives of colonial technologies of temporal discipline. She is also an organizer, a film critic and a film practitioner.

Christelle Ringuet (University Paris 8) obtained her M.A in Cinema at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne. There she studied the representations of Black American women in African-American cinema. She is currently a doctoral student in Cinema at the University Paris 8 Vincennes, where she is also a lecturer. Her research themes focus on the representations of Black American women, the activism of African-American female directors from the 1960s to the present day, Black feminist and queer theories.

Breya M. Johnson is a cultural worker, facilitator, organizer, and freelance writer living in Brooklyn NY. She is also the deputy director of organizing at GGE. She provides political education via Envisioning Safety on Our College Campuses. Her work looks at modes of disposability, reproductive justice, radical love, and abolition. She is interested in the inner workings of black women and girls and is finding a location for healing in the writings of black folks globally. She runs the Instagram blog: @Blackreadingtoheal

Roundtable moderator and organizer: Fania Noël, Ph.D candidate in Sociology (NSSR).

Registered attendees will receive the Zoom link via email.