Join Professor Emily Zobel’s Marshall who will focus on four key aspects of her work which centres around the theme of cultural forms as potent vehicles of resistance to oppressive power. 

Professor Emily Zobel’s Marshall inaugural lecture will begin by positioning the folkloric trickster figures Anansi and Brer Rabbit as strategies of survival for enslaved peoples in the Americas. She will demonstrate how Caribbean carnival cultures have been used as rituals of resistance to colonial and patriarchal power, and show how art can be a tool in the struggle for social justice through Emily’s work with the David Oluwale Memorial Association. Finally Emily’s ongoing research on ‘The Black Outdoors’, asks how we can ‘decolonise’ the literary and physical landscapes of the natural world through improving accessibility and diversifying both the outdoors and nature writing.

Drawing from over twenty-five years of research at Leeds Beckett University, her field work in Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, New Orleans, California, New Mexico and the UK and her own nature poetry and journey to become a Mountain Leader, Emily reflects on the entangled and rich connections between these areas of her work and explains how they inspire her confidence in cultural forms as a facilitator of radical resistance and profound social change.