The Black Lavender Collective Healing Symposium
Content
Join us in person for the Black Lavender Collective Inaugural Healing Symposium! This one-day event will be held on Saturday, April 4, 2026. Breakfast and welcome ritual is at 9:00 AM and the symposium begins at 10:00 AM.
The Black Lavender Collective (BLC) was founded at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to create an affirming and safe space for Black Feminists, women-identifying, and queer community members navigating a predominantly white institution. Rooted in healing, care, and community, BLC is guided by Black Feminist practice both inside and beyond the academy.
The Healing Symposium asks the question: How do we make Black Feminism legible in everyday life?
Through conversation, creative practice, ritual, and collective reflection, this gathering highlights both traditional and non-traditional Black Feminist expressions that make theory whole and lived.
We welcome our keynote speaker, Chadra Pittman! From the New York African Burial Ground project to her work honoring NASA Pioneer Katherine G. Johnson, a native of the Bronx, New York, Chadra is a Black/Seminole Feminist Anthropologist, Remembrance expert, Peace and Human Rights consultant, Social Justice educator and Public Relations strategist. Her research is centered on African American history and culture, Queer and Feminist politics, Memory, Race, and Identity, Necropolitics, the Middle Passage and the Transatlantic Enslavement Trade. She works to redress the erasure of women, LGBTQIA and BIPOC communities, and other marginalized groups by ensuring their names and narratives are included in the historical record and the literary canon.
Our panels include 14 brilliant scholars. The presentations include:
1. Panel: White Institutions and Survival
2. Panel: Community, Kinship, and Relationship-Building
3. Workshop: Zora’s Call to Action: Practicing Black Feminist Anthropology
4. Panel: Black Queerness
5. Exhibition: Everything Is Everything: Engaging Black Feminist Memory and Healing through the Fresh, Bold, & So Def Women in Hip-Hop Archive Initiative
6. Keynote
Join us for an evening of healing, connection, and celebration as we practice Black Feminism in action.
RSVP here!
Black Lavender Collective Healing Symposium