Exploring the History of Black Women's Mental Health Organising in Britain from the 1970s - Present Day

This project will explore Black women's mental health campaigning and how they perceived their impact on social movements since the 1970s. It will address what challenges and opportunities did Black women mental health organisers face and how they were able to mobilise along lines of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class and political ideology. The project will result in the first in-depth account of Black women's mental health activism in Britain. My research outcomes will include an engagement with the local organising community. Black women are largely absent in the historical and sociological literature on social change, specifically health activism and feminism. Their collective agency has also been overlooked in the literature on psychiatry and social movements. It will offer new perspectives on how Black women could undertake critical political analyses and turn them into praxis. The project is at its core innovative and experimental in using previously under explored archival collections in conjunction with the people who produced them and thus provides a unique insight into Black women's community organising in general. The thesis will encompass written and oral archival literature, grey literature and those produced by Black mental health campaigners in the UK. This projects collaboration with the BCA and local community organisers will inform the research on how the archival material has the potential of providing important implications for coalition building amongst activist groups today.