For ICAF 2023, dr. Emilie Diouf and Amina Seck join forces to combine their academic, artistic and activist work to present a workshop exploring creative responses to gender-based violence in Africa. They will pay particular attention to how cross-cultural and transnational collaborations between artists, scholars and marginalised communities can be conducted as an ethical collaboration, informed by decolonial perspectives and an awareness of scales of privilege. For this, Emilie and Amina will draw particular attention to the practices of ubuntu and gender justice.
Dr. Emilie Diouf is Assistant Professor at the Department of English at Brandeis University, Boston. Her research and teaching reflects her interdisciplinary background in African Literature, African American and African Studies, as well as Women’s and Gender Studies. Emilie is interested in the relationship between narrative, migration, trauma, and human rights, and particularly in expanding the field of trauma studies to include more substantially the voices of African women refugees. Emilie uses trauma theory to explore the ways in which African women survivors of civil war and genocide narrate the large-scale violence inflicted upon them. Alongside her academic work, Emilie also works as a feminist activist, particularly in her own context of Senegal. There, Emilie is part of a feminist collective, contributes to feminist platforms, and has organised the Festival of Women’s Writing and the country’s very first Women’s Book Fair.
Amina Seck is a specialised author and screenwriter. She published her first novel “Mauvaise Pente” with Diaspora Académie Editions in 2017. She also participated in the collective work on the Queens of Africa, “Martyr Luther Queens,” in 2018 and wrote and directed a short film on the practices of female genital mutilation; “Impure”, filmed in Ségou, Mali in 2018.
In 2021, Amina founded “Les Cultur’Elles,” which is an agency for the promotion of women’s art and culture. Her agency aims to highlight all women who evolve in the cultural milieu, by organising training, capacity building workshops, artistic residencies, symposia, and the production of collective works of art for women. She is the initiator of the Dakar Women’s Book Fair, which will be in its second edition in May 2023. A feminist activist, she is a founding member of the Platform of Feminists of Senegal and the Diaspora.