Reviving our Refusal: Legacies of Black Feminist Organizing in Britain
Thursday 14 May 2026, 3pm - 5pm
Ertegun House
All welcome
Black feminist organizing in Britain has long been an important site of political agitation, community building, and imagining towards a liberated future. From Mavis Best’s anti-carceral calls to scrap “SUS” police laws, to the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD)'s fight against the triply oppressive forces of racism, classism, and patriarchy, Black feminist organizers have cultivated solidarity and strategy for decades to fight the structural issues shaping their realities. They used this same autonomy to memorialize their struggles on their own terms. This rich legacy remains relevant today, as activists confront new manifestations of old harmful hierarchical systems.
Join us for a conversation moderated by Dr. Jade Bentil between OWAAD founder and member, Stella Dadzie, and community organizer and cultural producer, Nana Opoku to recollect important histories of Black feminist refusal in Britain. In reviving historic expressions of resistance, we will reflect on the persistent relevance of Black feminist organizing for the contemporary struggle towards a world centering justice and joy in the everyday.
A drinks reception will follow the conversation.
Stella Dadzie is a published writer and feminist historian, best known for The Heart of the Race: Black Women's lives in Britain which won the 1985 Martin Luther King Award for Literature, and was re-published by Verso in 2018 as a Feminist Classic. Her work on enslaved women, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance was published by Verso in October 2020 to much acclaim. Her latest book, A Whole Heap of Mix Up, will be published in October 2025. Stella is a founder member of OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent), a national umbrella group for Black women that emerged in the late 1970s as part of the British Civil Rights movement. She has been described as one of the “grandmothers“ of Black Feminism in the UK. Her personal archive in Brixton‘s Black Cultural Archives is one of the most visited by researchers and scholars from across the world. Her career as a writer, artist and education activist spans nearly 50 years.
She has written numerous publications and resources aimed at promoting equality and good practice, including resources to decolonise and diversify the UK national curriculum in schools and colleges. She is well known within the UK for her contribution to tackling youth racism and working with racist perpetrators, and is a key contributor to the development of anti-racist strategies with schools, colleges and youth services. She has run workshops and spoken at conferences in Germany, Slovenia, Poland, Norway, South Africa, the USA, Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia, and was a guest Lecturer at Harvard University in 2018 and 2023. She appeared in And still I Rise, Ngozi Onwurah‘s 1992 documentary exploring the social and historical origins of stereotypes of African women, and was a guest of Germaine Greer on her BBC2 discussion programme, The Last Word in 1994. She was also a Commissioner on the Mayor of London‘s African and Asian Heritage Commission, which aimed to promote more diversity across London‘s heritage sector, including its many museums from 2003-2004 She is currently working to support the National Maritime Museum’s commitment to highlighting untold narratives.
Nana Opoku is a cultural producer, community organiser, and facilitator whose work bridges cultural production and grassroots organising. Her practice is grounded in Black feminist methodology, shaping how she collaborates, builds teams, and supports ideas emerging from people working across intersecting identities. She was part of the managing team at The Feminist Library for over six years, where she founded The Culture Team, an ecosystem developing programmes that explore intersectional feminism as both methodology and praxis. Her work centres the creation of transformative learning spaces rooted in care, criticality, and community. Nana typically works behind the scenes, producing environments for liberatory thinking and action. She has, however, moderated and spoken publicly when needed, including at University of Warwick and Northeastern University, as well as institutions such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, often on the subject of artist collectives and grassroots organising. Her workshops and programmes engage themes including Afro-pessimism, Black feminist organising, and radical pedagogies, using theory as a living tool for collective reflection and action. Alongside her cultural work, Nana has worked with major media organisations to create access pathways for those historically excluded from creative industries. Most recently, she led the Off-Mic programme with Audible and launched a creative business incubator, The Accelerator, with Goalhanger.
Dr. Jade Bentil is a writer and historian from South London. She holds a DPhil in History from Merton College, the University of Oxford. Situated in Black feminist thought, her scholarship uses oral history methodologies to centre the experiences of Black women of African and Caribbean descent in Britain and their long histories of rebellion. For her doctoral scholarship on the Black Women’s movement, Jade was awarded the 2022 Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship from the North American Conference on British Studies, the 2023 Justin Champion Fellowship in Black British History from the Institute of Historical Research, and the 2024 Drusilla Dunjee Houston Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Jade’s debut book, REBEL CITIZEN, uses oral history interviews to explore the lived experiences of Black women who migrated to Britain following the Second World War and is forthcoming from Allen Lane. Her debut monograph, an oral history of the Black Women’s movement, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Jade is currently teaching a course on Black British Feminism as part of the MSt in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Oxford.
