Unsung Stories of Black Women’s Activism in the UK

Adele Jones, OBE, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Social Work at the University of Huddersfield, UK. A Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences, she has conducted research in over 23 countries and is the author of numerous publications (including seven books) on topics such as child abuse, adoption, residential care, migration, parental imprisonment, child refugees, gender-based violence, and HIV-AIDS. Notable among these, is a series of three books on child sexual abuse in the Caribbean, published by Palgrave Macmillan and credited as the first published books on the topic in the region. Founder of the None in Three Centre for the Global Prevention of Gender-based Violence (www.noneinthree.org), for which she attracted funding in excess of US$6 million, Adele’s most recent projects involved partnerships with local experts to tackle violence against women and children in Barbados, Grenada, St. Lucia, India, Jamaica, Uganda, the UK and Brazil. Describing herself as an academic activist, Adele was featured in Phenomenal Women: Portraits of UK Black Female Professors, an exhibition at London’s South Bank Centre which highlighted gender and race discrimination in academia and drew attention to the fact that out of 19,000 professors in UK universities, at the time only 35 of them were women of African or Caribbean heritage. In 2021, Adele was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in recognition of over 40 years work with vulnerable women and children. On accepting the award she said “I recognise that this title is symbolic of what our ancestors railed against but I also recognise that black women should be celebrated for their contributions to society. Accepting the award is a political statement against our exclusion and invisibility”. Diana Watt, PhD, is a former Senior Lecturer in Youth & Community Work studies at Manchester Metropolitan University and Associate Lecturer with the Open University. Her PhD research was on three generation of mothering practices among Jamaican heritage women in the UK. An academic activist at a time when a key concern was how teachers - ‘predominantly white, monolingual, female and middle class’ (Hick et al. 2011:6) could be enabled to be more culturally competent in teaching an increasingly diverse pupil population, Diana was one of the UK researchers on a National Teaching Fellowship Project on diversity and achievement among non-traditional students. This resulted in the publication of Promoting Cohesion, Challenging Expectations: Educating the Teachers of Tomorrow for Race Equality and Diversity in 21st Century Schools (Hick et al. 2011) which she co-authored. Diana was also a recipient of the Public Engagement Fellowship scheme at Manchester Metropolitan University; this provided an important opportunity for her and her colleagues to address some of the concerns in relation to  the experiences of African-Caribbean heritage school pupils and led to the Manchester Conference for Black Parents, Children and Young People. Diana’s publications include book chapters and essays on mentoring and the early development of Youth Work in the Black community. She is a Trustee of the Louise Da-Cocodia Education Trust, one of the civil society organisations that sprang out of the Abasindi Cooperative and which provides relevant and accessible education, employment, and enterprise services, in particular to people of African and Caribbean heritage.

• We are Descendants of the Windrush Generation.- The Legacy of Black Women’s Activism.- Cultural Expressions of Resilience.- Ancestral Journeys and Diasporic Connections.- Loving Body, Skin and Hair.- Sowing Seeds of Success.- The Politics of Sisterhood.- Reflections.- References.