Journal Vision
The Free Black University is an anti-colonial, Black and queer-led organisation that creates space to platform radical knowledge production. We exist to vision and reimagine the boundlessness of knowledge production and Black healing beyond oppressive institutions.
As we see the world around us rapidly changing, and the epistemes of whiteness crumbling beneath our feet, we are forced to ask: what next? We must create our futures, and with that comes the creation of cutting edge, challenging, and transformative knowledge. In the sense of Sankofa, we must both look forward and look behind us to articulate truths and beliefs that will continue to carry us through to liberation.
The Free Black University Journal will create a space for critical conversations about the liberation of Black people that we hope will serve as a catalyst for social change. We want to platform original and future-facing ways of thinking and transforming our world from a Black perspective.
This is not your typical journal — we want to give space and voice to knowledge that may not be validated within the “eurocentric masculinist knowledge validation process”, as Patricia Hill Collins calls it. We want to ask, what knowledges are ingrained within you? How can you call on the emotional, on the spiritual, as sites of knowledge production? How can we move beyond Western empiricism as the only valid route to understanding the world?
We want this journal to give space to radical imagining and visioning of Black liberation that cascades beyond what the current world considers possible. We want this journal to challenge us. Our contributors will write what is truly in their hearts — not what will meet whatever implicit standards whiteness has placed upon us. How can we push ourselves to imagine a transformed world? One where prisons and carceral punishment evade us as responses to harm; worlds where harm no longer exists; worlds where mental wellness and happiness are spoken of as if capitalism never existed?
At the heart of The Free Black University Journal, we believe that the world must look entirely different to how it looks today. We want this space to demonstrate to all that engage with it that freedom is found in how far we can push our imaginations outside of the limits Eurocentrism has placed on them. We as a society spend too much time focused on incremental change to include marginalised people in an inherently flawed system. This journal instead asks us to think expansively, and think of what the world looks and feels like, when all people are free and the climate is restored. Once we can imagine, we can begin building the bridges towards that future. We need to think about the long-game and demand more than we are told we are allowed to demand. This journal is ultimately about continuing the long-held tradition of using the radical Black imagination as a portal to freedom.
