Thinking Together | Grappling with the Colonial Archive: Performance, Place, and Public Engagement

Malmö Theatre Academy invites you to a conversation between Nana Osei-Kofi and Lena Sawyer, “Grappling with the Colonial Archive: Performance, Place, and Public Engagement”. The event takes place November 28th 17.00–19.00, and is open to the public. After the conversation we will share a meal.

In this Thinking Together, Nana Osei-Kofi and Lena Sawyer discuss their collaborative performance piece, “Listening” with Gothenburg’s Iron Well, which grapples with the reality of how the European colonial archive is hidden in plain sight within the public sphere. In this work, they examine Järntorgsbrunnen in Gothenburg through both their personal relationships to the site and a decolonial feminist perspective, sharing examples from Malmö to illustrate their key points. Their discussion aims to foster a broader affective engagement with the public archive in Sweden, inviting the audience to reflect on these themes in their own hometown of Malmö.

Thinking Together is a format in which members from the research department at Malmö Theatre Academy invite researchers and artists to think together in a public setting. Thinking Together: Grappling with the Colonial Archive: Performance, Place, and Public Engagement is our third event.

Food pedagogue Cornelia Altgård responds to the discussion by creating a meal that we will share after the talk. The event is open for everybody but if you would like to share a meal, please write to Sofie (sofie [dot] lebech [at] thm [dot] lu [dot] se) by November 26.

BIOs

Nana Osei-Kofi, Ph.D. (she/her), originally from Gothenburg, Sweden, is Professor Emerita of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the School of Language, Culture, and Society at Oregon State University. Her research centers on two primary lines of inquiry focused on justice and the politics of difference. One line examines structural shifts in higher education to promote equity and access, emphasizing curriculum transformation, change leadership, and faculty recruitment, retention, and development. The second line explores the experiences and conditions faced by people of African descent in Europe, with a focus on Sweden. Her most recent publication, AfroSwedish Places of Belonging, was published by Northwestern University Press earlier this year as part of their Critical Insurgencies series.

Lena Sawyer is an Associate Professor of Social Work and received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2000. Since then, she has lived and worked in Sweden, where she has been a teacher and researcher in social work educational programs. Her work is interdisciplinary and often collaborative, focusing primarily on understanding—and challenging—the reproduction of inequality through Black feminist, critical race, and post- and decolonial perspectives and methodologies. She is particularly interested in the politics of knowledge production, with a focus on examining social work institutions, including education and pedagogy, through these lenses. Her most recent publications include Counter Archiving as a Decolonial Pedagogy of Collective Care (with Kris Clarke and Nana Osei-Kofi) in Decolonising Social Work in Finland (Bristol University Press, 2024), and Antirasistisk pedagogik: Motarkivering som social omsorg (with Nana Osei-Kofi) in Realistiska utopier, spänningar, och vardagserfarenheter (Kriterium, 2024).