Select Works
Co-creating lines of inquiries and practices
WoMin is an African ecofeminist alliance dedicated to addressing the disproportionate impacts of extractive industries on women by working alongside women, peasant farmers, and communities affected by these industries. In collaboration with another African feminist consultant, as co-facilitators of reflection and learning, we supported WoMin and its allies to ask and answer difficult questions, recognize complexity and messiness, and surface silenced knowledge, in ways that could inform its next strategic development processes.
Watering grassroots knowledge, creativity and skills
Domestic workers in West Africa face disheartening levels of exploitation and violence in their workplaces. Few, but especially young girls and womxn (the great majority of domestic workers) have very little ability to seek or receive justice, nor can most afford to free themselves from abusive situations. Foundation for a Just Society (FJS), a feminist family foundation based in the U.S.A is a long time funder of womxn and queer rights in French-speaking Africa. Since 2023, I have worked with FJS in supporting the organizing efforts of domestic workers’ network (ADDAD) in 10 countries (both Francophone and Anglophone). My work with the ADDAD included facilitating feminist political education workshops in each country, organizing and facilitating their annual regional strategic spaces, and documenting their organizing efforts, as well as making recommendations as to how FJS (and other philanthropic organizations wishing to support the rights of domestic workers in West Africa) can assist the collective efforts of ADDAD and its member organizations.
Mapping resistance
Documenting and studying the dynamics interplays between the personal, the political, and the contextual challenges that support and limit social justice work is a genuine passion. In 2023, I had the delight of working with FJS to conduct three studies on activism contexts, political demands, and specific needs of three movements, domestic workers, sex workers, and young feminist movement, across six French-speaking West African countries. I produced three bilingual reports analyzing organizing priorities and demands of movements and provided a series of recommendations to support FJS’s philanthropic advocacy strategies to mobilize more international support for these movements.
Experimentation
I founded Djolifon in 2023 as an invitation to collectively articulate and foreground other and othered understandings of the work to be done and the journey yet to be traveled in these times of crisis. We seek to catalyze forms of creativity and activism that embrace the sensuality of the impossible and are comfortable with uncertainties, failures, and the limitations of politics. We especially seek ideas and practices that bring into the light the ways of the small, the slow, the “inefficient,” the “irrational,” and above all the invisible and the unthinkable in artistic and political imaginaries and endeavors.
I have a strong record of building bridges, making connections, and collaborating across diverse contexts throughout my career. Not only are lasting relationships a cornerstone of my career and life, I truly delight in, and am nourished by, working with various players and audiences across disparate locations, including challenging ones. I studied and lived on three continents. I work in French and English.