We spoke with Professor Awino Okech about her work and the Feminist Centre for Racial Justice.

Tell us about your background and how you came to SOAS?

I hold a PhD in gender studies from the University of Cape Town, so I am a feminist scholar and academic. Prior to my PhD, I was involved in community development work around the intersection between popular education and conflict resolution, working with communities in conflict affected zones in Kenya.

I moved later to work with an international NGO - ACORD international based in Nairobi - around the area of gender and conflict, managing their pan-African programmes working across countries in the Great Lakes region.

In this period - from work to finalising my PhD - I decided to develop a career in academia. I came to an academic job late, in fact, I did not do the PhD with the intention of becoming an academic.

I joined SOAS in 2016 at the Centre for Gender Studies, contributing to the postgraduate teaching across a range of programmes. I’d made a range of applications and SOAS offered me a job, so it is fortuitous that I ended up here. Only in the process of doing background research about the university, did I find out about its character as an activist-oriented institution.

I didn't come here because of expertise on Africa. I think if one wants expertise in Africa then you stay on the African continent, but I was looking to build an academic career. SOAS became a perfect home both in relation to the size of the institution, which has benefits in possibilities for collaboration with colleagues, personal growth and broader engagement, and its focus areas which leant very well to my work.

How did your work lead to the foundation of the Feminist Centre for Racial Justice?

The setting up of the Centre is linked to my own professional history. I see the connection between academic work and the world as a very important one, and that has shaped me. When I teach concepts and ideas, students have to leave the classroom with a full understanding of how to make meaning of those in the world.

The Centre represents that bridging between an academic space that centres research as a way of informing, understanding, and shaping resolution of challenges and big questions in the world, to the work of actively connecting that research to the doing. By that I mean that in the way we think of our work, researchers do the research, and people have to apply that research. More often than not, academics are not the people who apply the research. I was keen that the Centre create the space for us to bridge the divide that exists between movements, social justice activists, and academics.

How do we actively co-create the questions, the modalities, and the ways of thinking about some of the futures that we want to build together, rather than separately? How do we begin to challenge the divides that are often rooted in suspicion anchored in long extractivist histories of how researchers have used information for reasons that are often individualistic or driven by state interests, rather than community interest, rather than in service of those who are being researched?

The Centre is seeking to think through racial justice as a broader arc of understanding some of the fractures that are causing divisions in our world, and which we are seeing animated through a whole range of laws and policies that reify racial division, reify racial inequalities, as a way to to build a new world.

Feminism is a natural way to think about that because feminist theories in their diversity are invested in thinking about power, how power structures society, and how the intersection of gender, race, and class come together to create particular kinds of marginalisation.

The Ford Foundation made a grant to support setting up the Centre. This is a way of building partnerships and seeding ideas in ways that allow them to flourish in whatever direction. In the sciences, funding is given for experiments and it is okay to fail, but in the realm of social justice work, we are not allowed to test and fail. This is an example of what it means to invest money in an idea for the possibility of where it will go, without a pre-determined idea of what success looks like.

What are the aims for the Centre?

Action research is at the core of what the Centre is about. We invest in research that is interested in resolving a problem, that's why the action is linked to it. If action research is at the core and the Centre is interested in the majority world as a space in which to think about racial justice, then the transnational work becomes a central part of how we think about action research.

Key to the Centre's thinking is around transnational collaborations, because we are seeking to bridge regions that have had discussions in parallel around questions of racial justice and bring these conversations together across the regions.

If we take seriously the idea that research has to have meaning in the world, then we are seeking to connect that research to movement-building schools, which attract activists. We have piloted a school in Mexico with 15 activists from Latin America. It is an opportunity to take the research that we've done, test it, examine whether what we are saying actually makes sense, how it shows up in the regional context, and how activists use this material.

We do the research, push it into an action realm in form of movement-building schools, and hopefully translate that into policy impact-oriented work.

When we think about research, it’s also about the next generation. The investment in post-doctoral fellows and the investment in doctoral students as part of building a pipeline of researchers who are actively thinking around these questions, is a key aim of the institution.

What other programmes are being undertaken?

By December we will launch a call for transnational, collaborative research grants. The intention is to take the ideas we generated in scoping studies around priority thematic areas, and channel these into collaborative pieces of work across three regions: Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

The priority areas include domestic migrant labour. We’re looking at this because of the connection between domestic women's migrant labour between the Middle East and Africa, and the racialised nature of those labour regimes within those regions.

The second area is around global health inequalities. This has been animated powerfully through COVID-19. The intention is to examine the questions around transnational solidarity and transnational action work around health inequalities, and how that translates to positive health outcomes.

The third area is around reparations. This is a debate that has been live in all kinds of ways, from returning the loot in museums to the broader debate across former British, French, Dutch and other colonies on apologies for colonialism and slavery.

We are in early conversations with Makerere University to pilot a split-site PhD for students based at Makerere and co-supervised with FCRJ staff at SOAS as part of building a cohort of researchers. This is supported with funding from the Open Society Foundations.

We piloted the movement-building school in Mexico City with Just Associates, and we’re going to run another one next year in a different region.

What impact are you hoping that the Centre will have?

I went into the movement-building school we did in Mexico City doing two things: holding an idea of the kind of impact I imagined the school should have, as well as wanting to leave room to determine what that impact is as it comes from those who experienced the school.

The impact I saw was that the participants found the interventions we are making useful to the work that they're doing, that it informs their work, it extends how they are thinking about issues, and that they actively use the resources, whether training or research, towards the change that they're seeking.

At the end of the five days, to listen to the participants from across generations talk about the value of our time together to shifting their thinking, both analytically, but also how they think about their own interventions, that's success. In another six months, we can track that to see how much has translated, but from a basic principle of the pilot, I think that is success.

The PhD scholarships are easier to track because you end up with a very direct product, which is about a subject matter, and you’re contributing to a field, you’re contributing to discourse in very powerful ways.

How many members are there in the Centre?

The Centre is structured in two ways, because I'm trying to disrupt the idea of the traditional academic centre.

We currently have five members at SOAS organised across clusters with expertise in Africa, the Middle East, and India. Then we have a partnership model in which we work with organisations rooted in specific regions as part of the process of building bridges. We worked in Mexico with Just Associates because of their body of work in Central America, and the African Leadership Centre in Nairobi is an entry point for the relationships in Africa.

What are your personal projects at the moment?

The process of building an institution takes a significant chunk of my time, and a lot of the work that we will be doing over the next two years will feed my own research.

I have a book looking at the question of global blackness, which will be published by Manchester University Press. It extends and thinks about the idea of transnational solidarity with a key focus on the framework of pan-Africanism.

I remain invested in thinking about social movements, about feminist movements and social change specifically as it’s connected to the African continent around gender and sexuality issues.