No photo of Kariima Ali

Kariima Ali

20212021

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Research interests

I am currently doing a TECHNE-funded doctoral project, in collaboration with the Black Cultural Archives, entitled ‘Exploring the History of Black Women’s Mental Health Organising in Britain from the 1970s – Present Day’. 

This project aims to explore the critical relationship between Blackness, disability and madness, from a site of resistance through the archives. It is invested in how an analysis of the politics of care and the discursive forms of activism present in the emerging British Black women’s movement of the 1970s opens up important avenues for thinking about, past and present, intersectional abolitionist practices.

Black women and their collective agency are largely absent in the sociological and historical literature on the rise and influence of antipsychiatry and the service user movement. This project asserts that an exploration of the Black women’s movement’s strategies and every- day micro-politics of care and refusal challenges and animates understandings of insurgency, ‘madness’ and resistance.

Biography

Kariima Ali is an artist, curator, and doctoral researcher. Her current project is entitled ‘Exploring the History of Black Women’s Mental Health Organising in Britain from the 1970s – Present Day’, she is working in collaboration with the Black Cultural Archives. 

As co-founder of the collectives Black British Girlhood and Thick/er Black Lines, she has exhibited her artwork in a number of independent and public institutions, including the Tate and Autograph ABP. She is on the board of trustees for the arts and social justice project Idle Women and has a background in working with local community groups. 

She is also a member of the interdisciplinary training network and collaborative research initiative 'Black Health in the Humanities', based at the University of Bristol's Centre for Black Humanities.