Urban Studies and Social Policy Seminar Series
Date: Wednesday 05 March 2025
Time: 15:30 - 17:00
Venue: 386AB, Adam Smith Business School
Category: Conferences, Public lectures, Academic events
Speaker: Akwugo Emejulu

For this talk, I explore why and how solidarity fails in white-dominated centre and radical left activist spaces in Europe. Drawing on 167 interviews and focus groups with women of colour activists in six European cities, I argue that left solidarity falters because these spaces are constituted by ‘racialised solidarity’ which refuses reciprocal relations of trust and obligation to racialised groups (Hooker 2009). Racialised solidarity is made possible through what I identify as the sensuous inequalities of activist spaces. The visual, sonic, somatic and emotional work together to produce what I name as the racialised atmospherics of a given activist space, in which ‘the vibes are off’—in other words, the mood is mobilised against women of colour. Racialised atmospherics persistently haunt activist spaces, signalling that women of colour do not belong and must either self-censor or be ejected from these spaces. While inevitable under a regime of white supremacy, racialised atmospherics are not totalising. I conclude with a discussion of the possibilities for ambient resistances both within these spaces and by leaving them for alternative places constituted by different atmospheres, histories and relations not centred on white comfort, security and domination.