Black Feminism Now
| Dates: | 20 April 2026 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 16:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Arya Thampuran , Rianna Raymond-Williams , Tanisha Spratt , Kelechi Anucha |
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Four members of the Black Health and Humanities Network reflect on how Black feminist theory shapes our work, sharing research case studies.
In this moment of economic precarity, worsening health inequalities and an accelerating environmental crisis, Black feminist theory continues to offer essential tools for understanding the material conditions under which we live. It also offers an ethic of care and relationality that can guide us toward more sustainable and interdependent ways of being with ourselves and with one another. Through both the style and substance of their interventions, Black feminists challenge us to interrogate unexamined assumptions about what kinds of thinking are valued and who is recognised as an authoritative producer of knowledge.
In conversation with each other and with the intellectual foremothers who inform our work, we re-encounter Black feminist theory as a living and evolving field. We consider what is at stake in contemporary Black feminist thinking and its outgrowth from foundations laid by Audre Lorde, the Combahee River Collective and others.
The Black Health and Humanities Network is supported by the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University.
Hybrid event: online attendance registration via booking link. Light refreshments from 2.30pm.
Programme:
• Micro-interventions from panellists
• Panel discussion
• Audience Q & A
Talks:
• Beauty as method: investigating the uses of beauty and Black joy as anti-racist praxis, thinking through the work of Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe.
• Tarot as method: approaching questions of citational justice, embodiment and ecology through the lens of tarot, an undervalued mode of meaning-making.
• Reflexivity and autoenthography as Black feminist practice: how do Black women write themselves into their work, in order to challenge and correct historical and contemporary narratives that have excluded, distorted, or spoken over their lives?
• Cultures of “madness”: how are blackness and madness co-constituted as outside the norm? How can we challenge these dominant cultural representations?
Speakers
Arya Thampuran
Organisation: Durham University
Biography: Arya Thampuran is an Assistant Professor in Black Health and the Humanities at the Institute for Medical Humanities (Durham University). She co-leads the Black Health and the Humanities Network, a community of academics, artists, and activists working at the intersection of race, equity, and healthcare. She is interested in how embodied expressions of distress and healing might re-script prevailing Western psychiatric narratives of illness and wellness. This interest follows her off the desk and onto the mat as a yoga instructor with a deep desire to re-root the therapeutic practice of yoga in its cultural mythologies. Principally, her work is committed to a decolonial and intersectional approach, bridging interdisciplinary perspectives across the medical humanities, critical race, literary, and neurodiversity studies.
Rianna Raymond-Williams
Organisation: Glasgow Caledonian University
Biography: Rianna Raymond-Williams is a researcher, strategist, and creative practitioner working at the intersection of health equity, community research, and social justice. Her work centres the experiences of Black women, with a particular focus on sexual and reproductive health (SRH) in the UK. Through her doctoral research, she explores how systems of care are navigated, resisted, and reimagined, drawing on Black feminist theory, reflexivity, and autoethnography. Rianna is in the final year of her PhD in Health and Life Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) London.
Tanisha Spratt
Organisation: King’s College London
Biography: Dr Tanisha Spratt is a Senior Lecturer in Racism and Health in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London. Building on her sociology background and working across literary and cultural studies, Tanisha’s research centres on racial health inequalities in the UK and the US. Specifically, her research focuses on the role of neoliberalism in promoting and sustaining understandings of personal responsibility, deservedness and grievability when it comes to illness, death and dying. Tanisha is particularly interested in how racism-induced stress can lead to poor health outcomes for racial and ethnic minority groups, and how expectations of resilience can further impact those health outcomes. She is currently leading a Wellcome-funded project exploring the uses of Black joy in promoting Black British health.
Kelechi Anucha
Organisation: EACW
Biography: Kelechi Anucha is a Lecturer in Literature and Environmental Justice at the University of Manchester and a member of the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE). She has worked collaboratively in cross-institutional, interdisciplinary research teams and as part of creative projects centred on wellbeing, connection and equality. Her past and current work explores the impact of environmental crises on individual and planetary health, with a focus on how historic and ongoing forms of harm are distributed along racial lines.
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
C1.18
Ellen Wilkinson Building
Manchester
