SX Blog

From the University of Johannesburg's Center for the Study of Race, Gender & Class  
16th Helen Joseph Memorial Lecture - with Scheherazade Tillet

Date: Wednesday 10th August 2022
Time: 18:00 (SAST) / 12:00 (EDT)
Location: Ubuntu Chambers, UJ Kingsway Campus (map), or online

Gather with us this Wednesday for a unique reflection on Blackness, play, freedom, trauma and healing…

Those in Johannesburg can join them us person (please RSVP below). Those from our broader community can join online via Zoom (please register below). This will be a transnational sharing of lived experience and struggle, made urgent by the normative crisis of racial-sexual violence we navigate daily in South Africa.

RSVP for the in person event here.

Zoom registration (online participation) can be accessed here.

The 2022 Helen Joseph Memorial lecture is hosted by the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class and speaks to its emphasis on the relationship between Black feminist intellectual and creative praxis and activism. A photographer, art therapist and community organizer, their keynote speaker, Scheherazade Tillet engages us around practices of visibilizing Black girls and women’s experiences of community, gender and police violence at local and global levels. Co-founder and Executive Director of A Long Walk Home (ALWH), a Chicago-based national nonprofit, that uses art to empower young people and end violence against girls and women, Tillet uses site-specific work to explore the themes of gendered vulnerability, racial invisibility, pleasure, and play.  

The Helen Joseph Memorial Lecture has sat in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg since 2005. Named for the British-born anti-apartheid activist, the Helen Joseph Memorial lecture was spearheaded by the Centre for Social Development in Africa and Professor Leila Patel and intended to speak to Joseph’s legacy and that of the wider terrain of women’s movements in South Africa. The lecture is often held in August in commemoration of the 1956 August 9th Women’s March to the Union Buildings against pass laws that Joseph led, along with other leaders of the Federation of South African Women like Lilian Ngoyi. Tried for treason and held under house arrest for over two decades, Joseph was a strident critic of apartheid and a champion of the rights of women, children and families.