Sustaining Black Futures: A Conversation with Aida Mariam Davis
Join author, founder, and organizer Aida Mariam Davis as she discusses her "love letter to Black futures," Kindred Creation: Parables & Paradigms for Freedom (2024). She will be in conversation with Dr. Lupe Carrillo, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability to discuss frameworks of freedom and belonging that honor African and Indigenous wisdom and champion human dignity.
Hybrid Event: In-person at Stanford Humanities Center at 10am. Virtual attendance available via zoom.
Virtual attendees: Please register via Zoom to receive the webinar link.
Agenda
9:30 AM – Doors open and light breakfast reception provided. The first 35 people to check-in will receive a free book!
10:00 AM – Discussion with Aida Mariam Davis & Dr. Lupe Carrillo (Hybrid option via Zoom)
11:00 AM –Discussion ends and author book signing
About the Author
Aida Mariam Davis is the Chief People Officer at the Sierra Club and the founder of Decolonize Design, a boutique consulting firm working with nonprofits and Fortune 500 companies. She is the creator of the Belonging, Dignity, Justice, and Joy (BDJJ) framework as an alternative to traditional DEI models. Her work exposes the historical and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism, illuminating how extraction, oppression, and enslavement serve the goals of empire—disrupting ancestral connections and relationships to self, nature, and community.
About the Book (Description from Penguin Random House)
Drawing on African epistemologies and an embodied African beingness, Kindred Creation is a call and response to dream and design worlds rooted in African lifeways. It is a path to Black freedom, a love letter to Black futures, and a blueprint for intergenerational Black joy and dignity—always on Black terms. A vital path home.
Structured in three parts—Remember, Refuse, and Reclaim—this philosophical guidebook offers readers a way to:
Remember: Uncover the cascading violence of settler colonialism and its impact on African land, language, lifestyle, and labor.
Refuse: Reject death-making institutions and embrace kinship and self-determination.
Reclaim: Recognize that freedom is within reach, offering strategies for reclaiming land, language, lifestyle, and labor. The colonial violence and dispossession of African land, language, and labor is inflicted intentionally—and by design. Reclaiming African lifeways and remembering what was forcibly forgotten must be by creation: a remembering of our interconnectedness and kinship.