School of Social and Political Science

Description

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Drawing inspiration from the histories and contemporary experiences of Quilombo and Maroon communities across the Americas and the Caribbean, this event invites collective reflection on how Black diasporic communities create spaces of belonging, resistance, solidarity, and liberation.

Bringing together researchers, activists, artists, community organisers, and wider audiences, the conversation explores the possibilities and challenges of Black community building, particularly within the British context. Moving beyond narratives centred exclusively on oppression and suffering, while recognising their enduring impacts, we ask:

How practices of care, creativity, ancestral knowledge, human-nature relationships, and collective organising can help us imagine and shape alternative Afrofutures?

The event also invites queer perspectives to expand our understanding of community, belonging, kinship, and liberation, questioning established boundaries while remaining in dialogue with Black histories and traditions.

Expectations about the event: we will not follow a panel format. This gathering creates a participatory space for dialogue, reflection, and knowledge co-creation. Through short contributions and creative provocations, speakers and participants will collectively explore what it means to build, sustain, and transform Black communities across diasporic contexts.

Organised by RACE.ED.

Speaker Biographies

Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman is a guerrilla intellectual, with the plantation status of “research fellow”, both in abolition geography at the University of Birmingham, and in the Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull. Dr Coleman was the inaugural Reparation Coordinator for Quakers in Britain.

Dr Coleman is writing a new history of the movement for abolition in the British Empire: how we got free, if we got free. Rejecting, as “faux-bolition”, both the abolition of the so-called “slave trade”, and the so-called “abolition” of slavery, Dr Coleman insists that the only true abolition, and the abolition that is still ongoing, is the abolition of the pan-european christian nationalist slave code. “We are still governed”, argued James Baldwin, “by the slave code”.

During their last visit to the Edinburgh Futures Institute, on a panel titled “Rooting Decolonial Education: Routes for Repair and Liberation”, Dr Coleman described in detail their research into the British Slave Code’s highly influential invention of British Negro Apprenticeship. We invite you to watch their speech, which was recorded, between 32:00 and 56:00. Should you wish to take a deeper dive into Dr Coleman’s scholar-activist theory and practice, we further invite you to listen to their interview for the Birmingham Race Impact Group’s heritage project, “Seeking the Pioneers”.

Erica M. Zuniga is a final-year Indigenous Garifuna PhD researcher at the University of Strathclyde and Director of Arts and Cultural Performances at the Garifuna American Heritage Foundation United, Inc. (GAHFU). Raised speaking Garifuna, she foregrounds her language to examine Garifuna concepts of (in)visibility, time, and space through oral interviews with community members and to analyse cultural practices in Labuga (Livingston), Guatemala. Garifuna oral histories affirm that Garinagu (plural of Garifuna) were never enslaved. Erroneously labelled “Black Caribs” by British colonial authorities, Garinagu were forcibly exiled from their homeland, Yurumeiñ (Saint Vincent and the Grenadines), in 1797 to Roatán, Honduras, after sustained resistance to European colonisation. Erica’s research and community work explore how Garifuna people sustain knowledge, belonging, and spaces across generations through Ancestral, environmental, and cultural connections.

Emmanuélly Fernandes: I am a PhD researcher in the Postgraduate Programme in Environmental Sciences at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil and a visiting postgraduate research student at The University of Edinburgh. My research focuses on the relationships between agroecology, the valorisation of ancestral knowledge, biodiversity, landscape and culture in Black territories in Brazil. Since my master’s degree, I have been investigating the ecosystem services present in these territories. Now, as a PhD research, I aim to deepen this work from a decolonial perspective, reflecting on how to produce scientific knowledge in a way that is consistent with the respect, care and commitment that guide my relationship with these communities. At the same time, we are developing and refining methodologies to recognise and assess cultural ecosystem services, broadening the scope for understanding aspects of these territories that are not always addressed by conventional approaches. I am pet’s mum, I’m part of letter-writing clubs and I love stationery.

Tariqua Telahun Gorrissen is the Founder of Tariqua Rooted & Rooted Ways, and an Ethiopian-born elder, educator, traditional midwife, mentor and community practitioner with more than thirty years of experience supporting individuals, families and communities through life transitions, personal development and collective care.

Based in Glasgow, Scotland, her work brings together Indigenous African and ancestral knowledge, Western academic education, and decades of lived and professional experience. Alongside these, she holds a deep relationship with nature, recognising the living world and its wisdom as one of her greatest teachers. Her practice is grounded in a holistic understanding of wellbeing, recognising the relationships between our physical, emotional, social, cultural and environmental lives.