Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, as part of its research priority theme on Inequalities, Identities, and Justice.

What are the roles of science, math, music, art, hope, religion, and spirituality--indeed of co-creation and co-collaboration--to Black livingness? What counts as Black liberation given BIPOC complicity with (neo)liberalism, and yet with the incalculable array and “demonic grounds” of radical Black traditions, orientations, and movements? What are some of the bridges that can be built to combat woke-online armchair allyships and the algorithmic logics of “digitized racism” and its production of Black death and suffering? What are some of the tools that can be deployed to enact genuine acts of solidarity practices in the wake of what Robin D. G. Kelley calls the “Black Spring” of 2020 and in light of what Saidiya Hartman calls the ongoing “afterlife to slavery projects”? 

How do esteemed scholars Katherine McKittrick and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein read the spectrum of demands by BLM groups in relation to the Black Power legacies of, for example, the Black Panthers who incepted alternatives as the free breakfast programs and argued for the right to self-defense? How crucial is an internationalized anti-imperial and anti-colonial Black abolitionist politics to anti-racism and for combatting anti-blackness locally and globally--and how might we collectively devise an overarching strategy to do so?  In what ways do extant imperial and colonial forces operate differently toward Black people in terms of “necropolitics” (Mbembe, 2002) in determining who is invited into the realm of economic, political, and scientific life and who, instead, is confined to social death? This question--who must die so others may live--is central to our discussion on the ongoing theme of “decolonizing anti-racism.”