MAR 1.08,
Free
The LSESU Kurdish Society, Feminist Society, Students for Justice in Palestine and Race Matters Initiative at the Department for Social Policy invite you to a panel marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls on 25th November 2025.
Bringing together Lola Olufemi, Elif Sarican, Dr. Ashjan Ajour, and Annaís Berlim, this event convenes leading thinkers and organisers from the Kurdish, Palestinian, Latin American, and Black communities to foreground an anti-imperialist and internationalist framework for confronting gender-based violence.
The discussion will explore how gender-based violence is produced and sustained through imperialism, colonialism, and racism—particularly in communities sidelined by mainstream feminist discourse. It will also examine how imperialist powers co-opt narratives of gender-based violence to advance their own agendas, while highlighting women’s organising practices across movements. Together, our speakers will help us identify concrete practices of internationalism and solidarity that can be nurtured within our own spaces
Chair: Dr. SM Rodriguez, Department for Gender, LSE
Speakers
Lola Olufemi
Lola Olufemi is a Black feminist writer, researcher, and organiser based in London. Her writing focuses on feminist imagination, cultural production, and radical social movements. She is the author of Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020) and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (2021). Lola is also an organiser at the Feminist Library and a member of the anti-work arts collective "bare minimum."
Elif Sarican
Elif Sarican is a writer, editor, and translator who collaborates with cultural, community, and educational institutions around the world. She served as co-chair of the Kurdish People’s Assembly in Britain from 2020 to 2022, representing a community of over 300,000 Kurds across the UK. As an independent researcher, she has contributed to parliamentary inquiries and worked with artists to curate their archives. Elif is the author of the edited volume She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped the World and guest editor of the Barnard College S&F Online special issue Rage, Struggle, Freedom: Politics of Hope and Love. She has served as Strategic Operations Manager at the Decolonial Centre and currently works as Education Manager and head of the online Academy at the Left Book Club, a historic radical publisher established in 1936.
Dr Ashjan Ajour
Dr Ashjan Ajour is a Palestinian scholar and sociologist whose work centres on gender studies, feminist theory, political subjectivity, incarceration, decolonisation, and global Indigenous politics. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has taught in the UK and Palestine, including at Birzeit University. Her book Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes: Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body (2021) explores the politics of hunger striking in Palestinian prisons through a decolonial feminist lens.
Annaís Berlim
Annaís Berlim is a founding member of FALA – the Feminist Assembly of Latin Americans, a London-based intersectional feminist collective of women, trans, and nonbinary people from the Latin American diaspora. FALA organises for social, gender, racial, and environmental justice through an antifascist, anticapitalist, feminist, and decolonial lens. Annaís is also the Coordinator of the VAWG Advice Centre and LBTQ Specialist at Latin American Women’s Aid (LAWA), a leading organisation providing frontline support for Latin American women fleeing violence in England and Wales. LAWA runs the only by-and-for refuge for Latin American women in all of Europe.