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In 2021, the Office of the Associate Vice-President, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (AVPEDI), in collaboration with the Tshepo Institute for the Study of Contemporary Africa and Laurier’s Black Faculty and Staff Caucus, launched the annual EDI speaker series named after Associate Professor Lamine Diallo. Professor Diallo is a distinguished scholar in the Leadership program, the founding member of our two partnering groups at Laurier and one of our institution’s long-term champions promoting notions of equity, diversity, and inclusion across our campuses. This series is in recognition of his tireless efforts to embed these principles into our collective consciousness. 

Speakers for this series consist of recognized internal Laurier EDI champions, community activists, administrative and professional practitioners, and academic speakers from across the country. Consistent with Laurier’s broader EDI institutional strategy, the Lamine Diallo EDI Speaker Series helps to raise awareness, competencies, and understanding about equity, diversity, and inclusion within the context of Canadian universities, while encouraging and fostering meaningful conversations. Each event will serve to complement other EDI dialogues taking place across the university. 

2025-2026 Series: Reshaping Present and Future Worlds 

Reshaping the Present and Future Worlds” is the overarching theme of this year’s speaker series. The modern university has a complex relationship with dissent. On the one hand, it is a site where scholars are given space to push the boundaries of our collective knowledge to build an understanding of our existing world and imagine new futures that do not yet exist. At the same time, the modern western university is deeply intertwined with histories of colonialism, statecraft, and capital. Universities in settler colonies have mobilized research and education in support of extractive industries and the dispossession of Indigenous communities. Speakers in this year’s series will share how they work and research amid these contradictions, while imagining new possible futures    

Yannick Giovanni Marshall  

Black Struggle and Intellectual Life: 
Post Academia’s Capitulation to White Supremacist Power  

Date: October 2, 2025 
1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EST

Register Here

Description: 

This lecture develops the argument of my forthcoming book The End of Supplication (Bloomsbury, 2025): that Black resistance traditions have been politically neutralized and replaced with performances of supplication, vulnerability, and moral deference in order to be legitimated. If meaningful dissent survives anywhere on campus, it is in the gutters and “undercommons” of the university — with the targeted and undervalued students and professors. As even these spaces are increasingly occupied, the talk asks: where is the next refuge for serious thought, and how might we build or join centers of intellectual life elsewhere? 

Yannick Giovanni Marshall, PhD is a faculty member at California Institute of Arts, USA in self-imposed exile. A writer and scholar of African and Africana Studies he holds an MA in African American Studies and a PhD from the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies Columbia University currently under academic receivership. Marshall has published two collections of poetry, regularly contributes editorials and articles to Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and Current Affairs, and has given numerous talks and interviews on race, colonialism, radical dissent and policing. His forthcoming book The End of Supplication: The Invention of Prostrate Blackness as a Replacement for the Maroon will be out with Zed-Bloomsbury Press in 2025.  His writing and courses can be found at yannickgiovannimarshall.net

Past Events

Contact Us:

Andrea Davis, Associate Vice-President: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

E: avpedi@wlu.ca

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