York University Associate Professor Caroline Shenaz Hossein will be the first guest speaker for a new speaker series developed by CLLCTIVLY, a group in Baltimore, Maryland that seeks to partner with Black social change organizations.
Hossein, who teaches in the Department of Social Science in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LAPS), will deliver a talk Feb. 4 as part of the CLLCTIV Conversations. The event also aims to raise awareness on Black social justice and economic issues during Black History Month.
“African Americans want to hear from a Black Canadian feminist scholar about self-help, mutual aid and collectivity in the Caribbean and among Black Canadians as a way to local development on people’s own terms,” says Hossein.
Her talk “The Black Social Economy: African Origins in Collectivity” will focus on mutual aid, cooperativism, and self-help, which have been cornerstones of the African world for generations.
Baltimore also has a long history of self-help; W.E.B. Dubois wrote about the Galilean Fishermen, a benevolent society that was founded in Baltimore and incorporated in 1869 and became one of the largest African American organizations with over 5,000 members in Maryland by 1890.
Hossein will also take participants through the history of cooperatives throughout the African diasporic world with a focus on rotating savings and credit associations, as well as her empirical findings with hundreds of Banker Ladies.
Hossein’s research focuses on the Black social and solidarity economies, and her publications include the edited collection, The Black Social Economy in the Americas: Exploring Diverse Community-Based Markets. Her upcoming book Community economies in the Global South is written with Professor Christabell PJ at the University of Kerala and will be published by Oxford University Press. Hossein is the founder of the Diverse Solidarity Economies Collective made up of 20-plus feminist scholars writing on decolonizing the economy.
To register for this Zoom event, visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-black-social-economy-african-origins-in-collectivity-tickets-137977015969.