College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Liberal Arts and Sciences Liberal Arts and Sciences

While COVID-19 makes protesting in person even more dangerous than usual, international activists from Cape Town to Palestine have loudly proclaimed their support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Similarly, BLM activists have proclaimed their support for international allies protesting racial injustices and police violence across the world. This symposium brings together transnational scholars and students to interrogate how solidarity for Black Lives functions across differences in societies and regimes. The symposium will feature three keynote speakers and a graduate student panel.

This event is free and open to the public.

Friday, January 28, 2022

• 9:00-10:30 a.m.: Keynote 1: Maina Kiai, “Maina Kiai: “What does Black Lives Matter mean for democracy in Africa and the US?”

• 11:00 a.m. -12:30 p.m.: Keynote 2 : Noura Erakat, Solidarity is a Verb: Historical Articulations of Palestinian Transnational Solidarity and Contemporary Renewals

• 1:30-3:00 p.m.: Keynote 3: Yomaira Figueroa-Vasquez “Archives of Olvido: Disappearances, Femicide, and Black Puerto Rican Life”

Saturday, January 29, 2022

• 9:00-11:00 a.m.: Tiffany Pennamon, “‘Site of Memory’: Remembering Black Futures from The Netherlands to Cape Town”; Kimberly Williams: “Verzuz and International, Otherworldly Reverb”‘; Belay Worku Alem: “Property Matters in Black Lives”

Sponsors:

Black Lives Matter and International Solidarity is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, the Department of English, the Working Group for the Study of Critical Theory, the UF International Center, Center for African Studies, Latin American Studies, George A. Smathers Libraries, and the African American Studies Program.

Event Speakers:

Noura Erakat: A human rights attorney and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice. Her research interests include human rights law, humanitarian law, national security law, refugee law, social justice, and critical race theory. Noura is an editorial committee member of the Journal for Palestine Studies and a co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya, an electronic magazine on the Middle East that combines scholarly expertise and local knowledge. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019).

Noura’s scholarly publications include: “Racism, whiteness, and burnout in antiracism movements: How white racial justice activists elevate burnout in racial justice activists of color in the United States” in Ethnicities; “New Imminence in the Time of Obama: The Impact of Targeted Killings on the Law of Self-Defense” in the Arizona Law Review; and “Overlapping Refugee Legal Regimes: Closing the Protection Gap During Secondary Forced Displacement,” in the Oxford Journal of International Refugee Law. Her multimedia productions include the Black Palestinian Solidarity video and website and the Gaza In Context Pedagogical Project, featuring a short documentary. Her current research seeks to examine the activist praxes in contemporary renewals of Black-Palestinian solidarity and technologies of surveillance and counter-surveillance in greater East Jerusalem.

Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez: Associate Professor of Afro Diaspora Studies in the English and the African American & African Studies program at Michigan State University. Her work is centered on 20th century U.S. Latinx Caribbean, Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic literature & culture. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. in English, Puerto Rican & Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Douglass College).

Dr. Figueroa is the co-creator and co-curator of Electric.Marronage, a collaborative digital-material taller based on principles of fugitivity, Black femme freedom, worlds/otherwise, and decolonizing diaspora studies. Her recent book, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern UP, 2020), focuses on diasporic and exilic Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican texts in contact and was awarded the 2021 Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies.

Maina Kiai: The former Special Rapporteur for the Freedom of Assembly and Association of the United Nations and current Director of Global Alliances and Partnerships at Human Rights Watch. He is also a member of the Independent Oversight Board for Facebook.

Previously, he was a founding co-director at InformAction Kenya, a human rights NGO that promotes human rights through documentary film and debate and community action. He has also served as the founding executive chair of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, an independent state body, and as the founding executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission, Kenya’s leading human rights NGO. Throughout his career, Kiai has served in leadership roles at prominent national and international human rights organizations, received numerous fellowships, and published extensively. He received the George Kirkland Human Rights Award from the AFL-CIO, the Freedom Award from Freedom House, the Leo Navas Award from the UN Foundation of USA and the Public Servant Award from the Gay and Lesbians Coalition of Kenya, among other honors.