Founded in 2020, the Collaboratory brings together scholars, creatives, and organizers who engage Black feminist theory to develop transformative praxes toward liberatory health.
Our Story
The Collaboratory for Black Feminist Health and Healing is the fruition of a decade of collaborative engagement between Ugo Edu and Adeola Oni-Orisan in conversation with many friends, colleagues, and Black feminist ancestors.
Initially meeting as medical anthropology graduate students at UC San Francisco/UC Berkeley, Ugo and Ade came to Black feminist theory independently through their research abroad. While Ugo found that Black feminist theorists like Sueli Carneiro and Sonia Beatriz dos Santos helped her illuminate questions about sterilization and family planning in Brazil, Ade’s work on pregnancy and Pentecostalism in Nigeria led her to discover African feminist novelists like Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, who wrote pointed critiques of gender, postcolonial relations of power, the toxic masculinity of nationalism, motherhood, and missionary Christianity.
In the years following graduate school, becoming disillusioned with conventional academic space which often failed to meaningfully engage with Black feminist thought, Ugo and Ade found refuge in Black Feminist Health Science Studies. Inspired by Moya Bailey and Whitney People’s landmark article on the topic, Ugo and Ade sought to take action to create the spaces that they felt were missing from medical anthropology and health research and practice more broadly. Thus, The Collaboratory for Black Feminist Health and Healing was born.
The Spirit of the Collaboratory
In the planning of the inaugural BFHSS Collaboratory, we took the theoretical principles espoused by the budding sub-discipline of BFHSS and brought them into praxis. The COVID-19 pandemic offered a unique challenge and opportunity to deconstruct the conventional academic gathering and rebuild it with fresh eyes. In honoring Black feminist thought, we aspired to create an experience that was different from traditional academic conferences both in content and in form. Guided by the tenants of Black feminist epistemologies, we created a space that centered lived experience and emphasized collective dialogue as a legitimate mode of knowledge production while also validating the importance of care and personal accountability. The Collaboratory, a portmanteau of collective, collaboration, and laboratory, represents a new form of coming together around the sharing of knowledge and practice based in Black feminist thought.
Our Mission
Through a broad range of scholarly and creative activities, our mission is to inspire, support, and amplify community-driven health research and practice guided by Black feminist theory.
Guiding Principles
(inspired by and adapted from Bailey & Peoples, Towards a Black Feminist Health Science Studies, 2017)
1) interdisciplinarity and collaboration,
2) honoring liberatory lineages,
3) sustainable productivity,
4) the importance of creativity, joy, and playfulness in future-making towards liberation,
5) an emphasis on community care and rest.
Our Logo
Our logo design takes inspiration from across the diaspora. A popular design element of West African wax print fabrics, the “waterleaf” is a tenacious leaf vegetable, commonly used in West African cuisine and thought to have healing properties. At the same time, we were drawn to the way this same image conjures a staple in Black American churches, the church fan. Together the two meanings conjure an image of healing in community.
