On the morning of Saturday 01 April, dr. Emilie Diouf (Senegal, USA) and Amina Seck (Senegal) will facilitate an open round table discussion on violence against women, gender justice, and their impact on conflict transformation work across African contexts. They will also address the role of (community) arts and its capacity to contribute to imagining futures that can promote, not suppress gender justice.
Joining the main audience will be the cast of the The Whistleblowers (South Africa) Getrude Vimbayi (Zimbabwe), Bonface Beti (Kenya) and Nantea Dance Company (Tanzania). As such, the conversation will center perspectives informed by experiences with gender justice in Kenya, South Africa, Senegal, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
The exploration of gender-based violence in African contexts can be identified as a running thread within this years’ ICAF programme. This is not to posit that gender-based violence is an “African problem”; it is rather an intentional way of creating a space for learning from African women’s experiences with promoting gender justice and building more just, peaceful, and inclusive societies.
dr. Emilie Diouf, Assistant Professor at the Department of English at Brandeis University in Boston, and Amina Seck will lead the round table discussion, departing from their extensive background in Women’s and Gender Studies. Emilie’s work focuses on the relationship between narrative, migration, trauma, and human rights. She is particularly keen on expanding the field of trauma studies to include more substantially the voices of African women refugees and survivors of civil war and genocide, and how they narrate the large-scale violence inflicted upon them. Emilie has an established background in both academic and activist work with a firm focus on women’s representation and gender justice.
Amina Seck is a specialised author and screenwriter. She published her first novel “Mauvaise Pente” [‘Bad Slope’] with Diaspora Académie editions in 2017, 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, she 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.