About this Event
You're invited to Professor Ruha Benjamin Presents Black joy & Black grief event! Join us at King’s College London, 8th Floor North Bush House (Strand, London) for an exciting in-person gathering where we'll delve into the ways Black joy promotes health and wellbeing in the UK. This event is a celebration of resilience, resistance, and community.
About the study:
Dr Tanisha Spratt and Dr Nkasi Stoll (King's College London) are working on a Wellcome funded study and community project that explores the health promoting benefits of Black joy. Black joy is a term used to describe demonstrations of happiness, humour, and cultural pride within Black communities.
About Professor Ruha Benjamin's talk:
We will be joined by our amazing guest speaker Professor Ruha Benjamin. Amid multiple, interlocking crises, when even the most basic assertion that Black lives matter is contested, the facts alone will not save us. Drawing on Black poetics, the blues tradition, and Afrofuturist worldbuilding, Ruha Benjamin reflects on the complex relationship between joy and grief, inviting us to look beyond the visible terrain of injustice toward what is stirring beneath the surface.
Yes, through subordination, subjugation, and subalternity—literally, “under the ground”—racialized people are buried. But there is also a lot happening underground: not only coffins, but seeds, roots, and rhizomes; perhaps even tunnels and other lines of flight to new worlds, where alternative forms of kinship and creativity have room to grow.
Special guest(s): Professor Ruha Benjamin
Ruha Benjamin is a transdisciplinary scholar, educator, and cultural worker. She is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and Founding Director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab. Her work examines how science, medicine, and technology reflect and reproduce social inequities, while highlighting creative forms of resistance and reimagining through which people challenge dominant systems and seed more just futures.
Ruha is the award-winning author of : Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), : How We Grow the World We Want (2022), and Imagination: A Manifesto (2024) among other texts, and editor of (2019). She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and honors including the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, and the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.
Taken together, Ruha’s work invites us to imagine and craft the worlds we cannot live without, even as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within. You can read more about Professor Ruha Benjamin's work here: https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/
Agenda:
- Short talk from Professor Ruha Benjamin
- Conversational style talk about how Black joy, creativity, and radical imagination can create healing, resistance and liberation.
- Audience Q&A .
- Food, drinks, music and chat.
Event venue & nearby stays
Bush House North Wing, King's College London, 30 Aldwych, London, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.