Black Women's Solidarity Economies Combating Racism and Sexism: Why Organizing Matters More Than Ever
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Central
This event is co-organised by the BISR African Diaspora Research Initiative.
Radical Black feminist co-operators engage in globalizing solidarity economies through a specific form of mutual aid – formally referred to as Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs)–to meet livelihood needs. These women call themselves the Banker Ladies, and the ROSCAs they run are rooted in equity, collectivity and self-help to fight against erasure and exclusion. Valuing informal institutions, as well as acknowledging and remunerating the work of the Banker Ladies is a move towards inclusive financial economies, and by extension it can revolutionize the field of international development. This talk draws on empirical work that involves interviews with hundreds of Black women in the Caribbean, Canada as well as in Ghana and Ethiopia. It also calls out the erasure, the citational blindness and harms happening to feminist scholars doing this kind of anti-capitalist research.
Speaker: Prof. Caroline Shenaz Hossein (University of Toronto)
Caroline Shenaz Hossein is Canada Research Chair of Africana Development & Feminist Political Economy and Associate Professor of Global Development and founder of the Diverse Solidarity Economies (DISE) Collective. She is also the 2025 Black Feminist Economics Fellow at Ujima Project in Boston, MA. Hossein is the author of the award-winning book ‘Politicized Microfinance’ (2016), ‘The Banker Ladies’ (2024); co-author of ‘Critical Introduction to Business and Society’ (2017); editor of ‘The Black Social Economy’ (2018), co-editor of ‘Community Economies in the Global South’ (2022) and ‘Beyond Racial Capitalism: Cooperatives in the African Diaspora’ (2023) both by Oxford University Press
Agenda:
18:00 - Welcome and Introduction
18:15 - Presentation
19:00 - Q&A
19:30 - Event close
Contact name: Kalpana Wilson
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