Leslie Kern and Lola Olufemi
Radical Imagining for a Feminist City
Easter 2020-2021
Saturday, 1 May 2021
Abstract
‘What might a feminist city look like’? is the question that Leslie Kern grapples with in her book Feminist City; Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (2020). Held in conversation with author and activist Lola Olufemi, this discussion will reflect upon the gendered and racist harms enmeshed within the city, from the home to the street, that all work to foreclose possibilities of liberation. Drawing on the principles of kinship, care and protection without policing, this conversation will demand more expansive urban imaginaries that can transform the city in radically loving, just and inclusive ways.
Bio
Leslie Kern is an urban geographer and gentrification scholar living in Canada. She is the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Mount Allison University, and teaches as an Associate Professor of geography and environment. She is the author of two books; Sex and the Revitalized City: Gender, Condominium Development, and Urban Citizenship (UBC Press, 2010) and Feminist City; Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (Verso Press, 2020). Feminist City is an ongoing exploration into living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world.
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and researcher from London. She is co-author of A FLY Girl's Guide to University (Verve Poetry Press, 2019), author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2019) and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, forthcoming from Hajar Press in 2021. She is a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective and the recipient of the 2020 techne AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership between The Stuart Hall Foundation, CREAM and Westminster School of Arts. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination, its relationship to futurity, political demands and imaginative-revolutionary potential.