Telling our stories: How does storytelling and writing shape activist movements?

Marlihan Lopez is a Black feminist community organizer tackling issues surrounding anti-blackness, gender-based violence and its intersections. She coordinated the EDI (equity, diversity, inclusion) division of the Quebec Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres, where she did advocacy work and raised awareness on how gender, race, class and ability intersect in the context of sexual violence. She has also organized with movements such as Black Lives Matter around issues such as racial profiling and police brutality. She was co-vice-president of la Fédération des femmes du Québec and is the co-founder of Montreal's Defund the Police. She is also cofounder of Harambec, a Black feminist organization in Montreal that bridges academia, community and the arts.

Today, she dedicates most of her time to Black feminist memory work committed to unearthing, preserving, and honouring the cultural and epistemic productions of Black women and gender-expansive people. Her work is rooted in Black feminist thought and speculative methodologies, as well as an abolitionist and anticolonial praxis.  She weaves together oral histories, critical archival research, and storytelling to challenge erasure and create spaces for communion and intergenerational knowledge transmission. Drawing from Afro-Caribbean traditions of ancestral remembrance and knowledge-keeping, Marlihan’s scholarship and creative practice focuses on facilitating Afro-diasporic reparations and pathways to healing from intergenerational trauma stemming from colonialism and white supremacy. She views embodied memory work as a form of maroonage, conjuring the spirits of her foremothers and envisioning liberatory futures.

Currently a PhD student in the Individualized Program in Fine Arts at Concordia University, she’s also the Academic Advisor for the Women’s Studies and Black Studies programs at Concordia University where she contributes to Black feminist programming and curriculum development.

Gage Karahkwí:io Diabo is a Mohawk scholar from Kahnawake, recently hired at Concordia as an Assistant Professor with a cross-appointment in English and First Peoples Studies. Their research concerns the entanglement of land, oral tradition, and political philosophy in Indigenous literature, especially that of the Mohawk nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Their essays on Beth Brant, Waubgeshig Rice, Tom Porter, Lee Maracle, and Robert Alexie have been published in Canadian Literature, Studies in American Indian Literature, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and The Capilano Review. They graduated with a PhD in English Literature from the University of British Columbia in 2023 and recently held the Horizon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Concordia.