Rehumanising The Ends
A panel discussion with:
Dr. Joy White
André Anderson
Dr Yusef Bakkali
Alex Augustin
10/11/2023
19:00 – 21:00
ICF @ Block 336
336 Brixton Road
London SW9 7AA
Description
This panel discussion will feature Dr Joy White, André Anderson (Freedom & Balance) and Dr Yusef Bakkali, and will be chaired by Healing Justice Ldn’s Alex Augustin. It will explore the history and context of global majority working class culture, artistry and resistance, promoting autonomous and beautiful narratives of our communities, and creating space to think together about liberatory futures for the ends/working class racialised communities. Against the backdrop of constant narratives of violence and victimhood, this panel will be an opportunity to rehearse a whole selfhood, rejecting the fractioning, objectification and dehumanisation of the ends/working class racialised people. What does it feel/look like to lean into expressions of the ends as being rooted in joy, love, being with one another, witnessing one another, embodying anti-capitalist practices, and rejecting scarcity in favour of abundance and interdependence?
This workshop will be BSL interpreted.
Biographies
Dr Joy White is a senior lecturer in Applied Social Sciences at the University of Bedfordshire and the author of Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City. Joy has presented her work at a number of UK and international institutions including The Post-Windrush Generation: Black British Voices of Resistance, the University of Cambridge, the Subcultures Network Conference Panel, the University of Reading, The Place of Music, Loughborough University, the Annual Black Studies Lecture, the University of Nottingham, the Stanford University Forum for African Studies, Urban Culture and Political Engagement, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, the 3rd International Research Conference on Cultural and Creative Industries, the University of Antwerp, the Eastern Sociological Society, the 5th International Digital Storytelling Conference andHacettepe University. Her previous work includes Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, Rhymes and Young People’s Enterprise, one of the first books to foreground the socio-economic significance of grime music.
Andre Anderson is the Founder and Headmaster of Freedom & Balance, an art college based within London. Freedom & Balance designs curricula to help people exercise their creative identity. Andre believes art college is for everyone, and, when done well, can help people to ask the right questions in new ways, in a world that is ever-changing and in need of solutions.
Alex Augustin is a member of the core team at Healing Justice Ldn, where he works on their communications and the Reimagining Masculinities programme. Through his experiences of growing up in Brent, north west London, he has always had an awareness of injustice and inequity. Alex writes and has held discussions about the psychological and emotional impact of structural harm in “the ends”. During his time working at the Ubele Initiative, he got insight into a range of community and movement work.
Dr Yusef Bakkali grew up in Brixton, south London, and from an early age became aware of injustice and inequality operating in society. His key research focuses around the lives of young people involved in “Road Life” – a contemporary street culture of which elements have recently been the subject of popular media representations in shows like Top Boy (Channel 4/Netflix) and films like Blue Story (BBC Films/Paramount Pictures). Yusef’s areas of expertise are youth, social exclusion, race, crime, music, youth cultures, road life, austerity, decoloniality and masculinities. He holds a PhD in sociology, an MSc in Social Research Methods and a BA in Politics and Society.
