Kollektiv Omsorg: Collective Care as Black Feminist Praxis Within, Outside and Against the Academic

This is a presentation of Jasmine Kelekay, Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo and Lena Sawyer's work and collective "Kollektiv omsorg".

In this session Kelekay, Midtvåge Diallo and Sawyer will converse about Kollektiv Omsorg and how they have, over the past three years of working together, strived to center, theorize, and practice collective care as a decolonial Black feminist praxis within, outside, and against the neoliberal academic machine.

"We formed our collective in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global Black Lives Matter uprisings as a means to support each other in navigating the intellectual isolation of academia as Afro-Nordic scholars. Through our collective care and centring of care, we have been led to collaborate, think, and produce differently. This in turn, has been central to our own re-imagining of what intellectual work can be and feel like."


Jasmine Kelekay is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University and an affiliated scholar at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Racism (CEMFOR) at Uppsala University. She holds a PhD in Sociology with an emphasis in Black studies (UC Santa Barbara). As an AfroFinlandSwedish scholar, her work focuses on the politics of Blackness in Sweden and Finland, including Black feminist theory and praxis, Afrodiasporic cultures, community organizing, and the racialized politics of criminalization, policing, and punishment.

Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo is an AfroNordic feminist scholar of ‘black study’: a non-disciplinary, collaborative, and embodied mode of knowledge creation. She holds a Master’s in Anthropology and a PhD in Gender Studies. As a Fulani, Norwegian, and Danish person, she thinks through the materialities of Nordic colonialisms by exploring anticolonial knowledge practices across Afro-diasporic and Nordic indigenous arts and organising. Oda-Kange is a co-founder of the Black Feminist Summer School in Amsterdam.

Lena Sawyer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work at Gothenburg University Sweden, she has a PhD in cultural anthropology (UC Santa Cruz). She is African American and Swedish, born in New Jersey in 1968, and her work has focused on the history of racism, and particularly anti-Blackness, in Sweden as well its embeddedness in Swedish institutions (such as Swedish social work and education). Black feminist theories have been central to the collaborative arts-based and walking pedagogies she has most recently been working on.


The presentation will be in English and takes place on Zoom. To participate email Linn Sandberg to obtain the link.