About

This project will explore Black women’s mental health campaigning and their perceived impact on social movements since the 1970s. Despite being disproportionately affected by ill mental health, Black women are largely absent in the historical and sociological literature on health activism and feminism. It will address challenges and opportunities Black women mental health organisers faced, and how they were able to mobilise along lines of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and political ideology.

This project will result in the first in-depth account of Black women’s mental health activism in Britain. Bringing together under-explored archival collections and interviews with the people who created them, it will offer new perspectives on how Black women undertook critical political analyses and turned them into praxis. 

This is an innovative and experimental project in that it will be utilising previously under-explored archival collections in conjunction with the people who produced them and thus provides a uniquely intimate insight into Black women’s community organising over the last 40 years. This project is in collaboration with the Black Cultural Archives and will aim to redress the erasure of Black women’s collective agency in contemporary thinking about social change and mental health organising.