5×15 on Coalition Building with Shon Faye and Emma Dabiri

Monday 22 November 2021

Best-selling and ground-breaking authors Emma Dabiri – What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – and Shon Faye – The Transgender Issue – will discuss their work, our current divisions and how we can come together to tell a new story and unite seemingly disparate areas.

 

In What White People Can Do Next, Emma Dabiri’s best-selling manifesto tackling our current discourse on race, she argues that we require “an understanding, not so much of an intersectionality of identities, but an intersectionality of issues. Linking our struggles together is the work of coalition-building, a vision wherein many people can see their interests identified and come together for a common good. We can start to tell new stories, rather than fall back along fault lines that were designed to divide us, to better exploit us.”

Shon Faye’s debut book, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice, is an urgent manifesto for change, calling for justice and solidarity between all marginalized people and minorities. Through coalition building, can we move from theory into practice and find a path to create a more just, free and joyful world for us all?

Don’t miss this thought-provoking and timely discussion.

Shon Faye was born in Bristol, and is now based in London. After training as a lawyer, she left the law to pursue writing and campaigning, working in the charity sector with Amnesty International and Stonewall. She was an editor-at-large at Dazed, and her writing has been published by the Guardian, the Independent and Vice, among others. Faye recently launched an acclaimed podcast series, Call Me Mother, interviewing trailblazing LGBTQ elders. Her debut book, The Transgender Issue, is an instant Sunday Times best-seller.

Emma Dabiri is an Irish-Nigerian academic, activist, broadcaster and teaching fellow in the Africa department at SOAS and a Visual Sociology PhD researcher at Goldsmiths. Her 2019 debut Don’t Touch My Hair, (Penguin) was an Irish Times Bestseller and published to critical and commercial acclaim. The book also inspired a national conversation about race and hair and has led to changing regulations in schools and in the British army. A regular broadcaster on the BBC, Emma presented ‘Back in Time Brixton’ (BBC2), ‘Britain’s Lost Masterpieces’ (BBC4), as well as the sociological experiment ‘Is Love Racist?’ (Ch4). Most recently, she hosted Radio 4’s critically-acclaimed documentary ‘Journeys into Afro-futurism’.