Project Description
Convened in response to the proliferating forms of violence facing black populations in the US and in diaspora, the mission of the Practicing Refusal Collective (PR Collective) is to articulate black feminist strategies for addressing the precarious state of black communities resulting from policies that treat black bodies as disposable and expendable – a state of duress we describe as black fungibility. The ‘practice of refusal’ referenced in the group’s title names its rejection of this current status quo as livable. It is a refusal to accept black precarity as inevitable, and a refusal to embrace the terms of diminished subjecthood with which black subjects are presented. We seek instead to develop strategies for confronting black fungibility and creating alternative possibilities for living otherwise.
To inaugurate the fourth year of this project, the Collective launched an ambitious program of transnational conversations under the title “The Sojourner Project”. The Sojourner Project expands the conversations begun by the PR Collective by creating multi-directional dialogues in a range sites in Africa and its diasporas with local artists, activists, scholars and thought-leaders working to develop their own strategies for addressing black precarity, fungibility, and anti-black violence. The goal of each convening is to explore these questions from the vantage point of the cultural and regional specificities of each site through public dialogues with artists, activists, educators, writers, and creative practitioners interested in developing a transnational approach to tackling these complex issues.