The Centre for Women’s Studies: International Women’s Day Keynote Lecture

Words and Matter: Notes Toward a Collective Intersectional Feminist Vocabulary. Juliana Mensah, English and Related Literature, UoY

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Thinking with Christina Sharpe’s hybrid methodology in her recent book, Ordinary Notes, this talk is structured as a series of notes drawn from academic practice and ‘the field’. Each note will offer a vignette alongside a word for inclusion in a provisional feminist glossary. Engaging intersectionality as an ongoing method of accountability, the talk asks what kind of shared vocabulary might better sustain collective struggle across difference. The keynote concludes by inviting participants to contribute to this evolving glossary, in an attempt to foreground feminist language as a material practice that resists tidy conceptual closure.

About the speaker: Juliana Mensah is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of York. Her novel, Castles from Cobwebs, was nominated for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the NorthBound Book Award. Her short stories have been published by Comma Press, New Writing North, Dead Ink and Bloomsbury; and her plays have been produced by companies including Pilot Theatre and Live Theatre, among others. She has worked with a number of grassroots women's organisations including the Angelou Centre and Sangini. Juliana was a Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Centre for Applied Human Rights and has collaborated on a number of international research projects, partnering with human rights organisations in Malaysia, Indonesia, South Africa, India, Hong Kong and Egypt. Juliana was recently awarded a Jerwood Writing Fellowship by the Jerwood Trust and New Writing North.