Description
Drawing on Sara Ahmed's articulation of feminist hope, this paper illuminates hopeful visions of equity and culturally responsive trauma-informed leadership articulated by Black and other racialised women who have experienced, witnessed and/or work as frontline practitioners within Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (DASV) services in East England, a region adversely affected by the postcode lottery of support (DAC, 2022). These visions emerge from a Medical Research Council UKPRP funded project (led by Dr Guha and Dr Allen) on fostering the leadership of Black and racialised women regionally, and a pilot study on Asian-heritage women’s vulnerabilities around domestic abuse in Cambridgeshire (led by Dr Guha). Together, these decolonial accounts of world-making illuminate the aspirations and resistance (s) of racially marginalised victims-survivors from scattered and under researched diasporic communities as they challenge institutionally imposed ‘solutions’ which epistemically erase their complex experiences. Furthermore, they illuminate the potential of ‘accidental leadership’, emanating from trauma and pain, to intervene against and decolonially transform an exclusionary landscape of public services.
