We warmly welcome you to the final webinar in the series, with Fọláṣadé Ajayi (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) & Zuleika Bibi Sheik (Utrecht University). See below for a list of all the webinars in the series.
Black Aliveness: Hope as a practice
When: Wednesday, 3rd December 2025 , 16:30-18:00 (Helsinki time)
Where: Teams webinar. Join here:
This webinar brings together Zuleika Bibi Sheik and Fọláṣadé Ajayi. In this session Fọláṣadé and Zuleika will reflect on their respective research practices, the relations which nurtured their work and the ways in which we can honour relations and hope in times of violence and erasure.
Dr Fọláṣadé Ajayi is a political scientist whose PhD research at the Brussels School of Governance explored Black activism in Germany from a community-oriented perspective (summa cum laude). Based in Brussels, she is part of the Equinox Initiative for Racial Justice and believes that another world is possible.
Dr Zuleika Bibi Sheik is a South African poet and scholar of South Indian indentured descent. She is currently Assistant Professor of Decolonial Approaches, Gender and Black Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her particular interest is in ‘decolonizing methodologies’, considering the ‘how’ of doing research that is non-extractive, life-affirming and aimed towards social justice and collective liberation. Sheik was awarded her PhD cum laude, for her thesis,
South-East futures after Non_Aligned Afterlives
When: Wednesday, 12th November 2025 , 16:30-18:00 (Helsinki time)
Where: Teams webinar. Join here:
In this session, the speakers will come in conversation for building on the longer and shared histories and solidarities across Souths and Easts.
Piro Rexhepi is an LSE Fellow in Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has degrees in International Relations from the City University of New York, a PhD from the University of Strathclyde and was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and University College London. He is the author of
Dino Suhonić is the director of the Maruf Foundation, an international platform dedicated to the support and advocacy of queer Muslims. As a prominent community organizer, educator, and author, Suhonic has significantly contributed to the discourse surrounding the intersectionality of race, religion, gender, and sexuality. He is also the author of
Streets, Institutions and Knowledge: Chanting Epistemic Refusal in Post Hip Hop(e)
When: Tuesday, 28th October 2025 , 16:30-18:00 (Helsinki time)
Where: Teams webinar. Join here:
Elham Golpushnezhad is Assistant Professor at Al Akhawayn University, Morocco. She is an educator, Hip-hop ethnographer, Writer, and Researcher of Music Subcultures. She is also the maker of the
Soukaina Chakkour is lecturer at Al Akhawayn University, who works on issues of migration, postcoloniality and temporality. She has published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Ethnos, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Gentle Asphyxia: Circlusion, Embrace, and Collapse of Institutional Bodies
When: Wednesday, 15th October 2025 , 16:30-18:00 (Helsinki time)
Where: Teams webinar. Join here:
In this session Clara Balaguer presents fleshy notes on imagining how extra-institutional publishing practices can (and do) nest inside institutions to transform established pathways of knowledge production, circulation, and access to intellectual capital. The bio-mythical conditions of the strangler fig (and other epiphytes) inform crucial questions about the limits of canonical structures we have inherited that no longer serve us, not because they have no value but because the scale of crisis in the times we live far surpasses the conditions that gave rise to these institutional shapes.
Body philosopher Vishnu Vardhani Rajan responds with skin marginalia and from Schizophrenia as Methodology drawing from their work for the book and recent performance
Clara Balaguer is a cultural worker, curriculum builder, and grey literature circulator. From 2010 to 2018, she articulated cultural programming with rural, peri-urban, and diasporic communities from the Philippines through The OCD, a living room residency program and cultural unit. In 2013, she co-founded Hardworking Goodlooking, a cottage industry publishing hauz that operated from Parañaque, Portland, Laguna, and New York. Previously, she has built program as curator of Civic Praxis at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht; program head of Social Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam; and teacher for the Design Department and Dirty Art at Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. Frequently, she operates under collective or individual aliases that experiment with forms of cultural remittance, the latest of which are To Be Determined and Galley Copy Shoppe. Currently, she teaches
Vishnu Vardhani Rajan is a body-philosopher and performance artist based in Helsinki building connections between art, science, witchcraft, history and cultures through performance, filmmaking, writing, poetry, comedy, and somatic explorations—centering the body as a site of knowledge and resistance. Vishnu creates a lived praxis, where art becomes a direct extension of their life's journey - on the frontiers of art, performance, philosophy and politics. Vishnu has initiated sustained community building endeavors such as the Convivial Complaint Cell & Infinite Playlist Afterisms; Intersectional Feminist Policies Ombudsperson (In Training), Feminist Leadership Agent, Board Member of Madhouse Helsinki, and collaborates in COLORBLOCK, and is a Support Group Facilitator for ADHD
Margins in Relation: Refusing a Politics of Separation
When: Wednesday, 8th October 2025 , 16:30-18:00 (Helsinki time)
Where: Teams webinar. Join here:
This session brings Fatima El-Tayeb (Yale University) in conversation with Abeera Khan (SOAS University of London).
Fatima El Tayeb is the author of
Abeera Khan is the author of
The Five Crows of Jitsology: Occupation, Restoration, Healing, Negation, Visibility
When: Wednesday, 24th September 2025 , 16:30-18:00 (Helsinki time)
Where: Teams webinar. Join here:
This session brings Jitsvinger (word-architect) in conversation with Jody Metcalfe (Utrecht University).
Jitsvinger recently received the Neville Alexander Award for Outstanding Contribution towards the Promotion of Multilingualism by the
Jody is the author of “Countering Colonial Memory Through Public and Popular Culture in Cape Town” (2025) and several other publications and collaborative works. She is also the co-editor of the edited volume, differential doings, europes in margins (forthcoming 2026). Please join the webinar series via this link. Please be aware that the time of the event is based on Dutch time. This link will be valid throughout the series. If you have any technical issues please contact
Opening session: On living method in deathly times
When: Wednesday, 17th September 2025 , 16:30-18:00 (Helsinki time)
Where: Teams webinar. Join here:
Short speaker bios
Asma is the author of
Saba is the author of
About the webinar series and upcoming book
The webinars aim to provoke debate, initiate transformative and transdisciplinary ways of being, doing and knowing amongst students, transnational communities and research/artistic networks.
We are excited to announce a wonderful line up of speakers/scholars/artists/thinkers/makers from across locations who will be engaged in conversations that hold space for knowledges otherwise erased as part of the violence of wars, genocide, occupation and settler colonial modalities affecting our present. We invite you all to join us in doing this work.
The book offers a radical lens for modes of knowing, being and doing social scientific inquiry differently and against extractive forms of knowledge production in colonial universities, across standpoints canonically obstructed as the margins of europe, to what we refer as differential doings, europes in margins. It enacts differential doings (from the perspectives of colonially and racially subjugated populations) as refusing the politics of separation, rejecting the subject/object of marginality, cracking european canons of thought and co-creating embodied relational temporalities. The collection builds on the calls of Black, decolonial, anti-apartheid feminist praxis for dismantling dominant modes of representation across modern disciplines needed for emancipating the categories of marginality from the registers of object, commodity, and the researched other.
Webinar schedule
17 September 2025: Asma Abbas (Al Akhawayn University), with Saba Hamzah (Vrije University Amsterdam)
24 September 2025: JITSVINGER (word-architect), with Jody Metcalfe (Utrecht University)
8 October 2025: Fatima El-Tayeb (Yale University) with Abeera Khan (SOAS University of London)
15 October 2025: Clara Balaguer (XPUB, Piet Zwaart Instituut) with Vishnu Vardhani Rajan (body philosopher)
12 November 2025: Piro Rexhepi (University College London) with Dino Suhonić (Maruf Foundation)
26 November 2025: Giti Chandra (University of Iceland) with Kolar Aparna (University of Helsinki)
3 December 2025: Zuleika Bibi Sheik (Utrecht University) with Fọláṣadé Ajayi (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)