In April 2025, I began my journey as Chair of SPARK Academia. Since then, racialised scholars are increasingly facing challenges in a continent that is experiencing an existential crisis – who is European? Can the naturalised immigrant be European or is that reserved for the autochthon only? These questions around belonging and autochthony have become defining moments.
Presently, in New York, an African Muslim immigrant of South Asian descent has become the mayor following Sadiq Khan in London. With these new realities, scholarship has a new challenge requiring a reimagining as it adapts to an evolving global order. Moreover, we are witnessing the demise of Western Imperialist thinking. Consequently, the ever-present issue of migration exacerbated by the climate crisis will accentuate matters of race and intersectional race politics.
However, this offers us an opportunity to reimagine the university as an incubator for the values of social justice. Focusing on respect for difference as part of the foundations for co-existence; not only human but multi-species, complemented by technology. In such a world, the option of acquiescence is no longer valid. A good example of this is the saga of criminalising Palestine Action in the UK.
With fascism and anti-immigration sentiment on the rise in Europe, it is important to have spaces that build solidarity and resistance. More importantly, these spaces offer an opportunity for a different discourse. As Saidiya Hartman stated, Black life persists amidst social death. In this light, SPARK was created to nurture antiracism work within various spaces where institutional state apparatuses are affected. As one of the SPARK Academia members, Samia Kotele calls it, 'we need to hold onto good anger as a strategy of resistance.'
SPARK monthly meetings offer a space for collective good anger as we connect with common struggles in different national contexts. Here good anger can contribute towards policy work and change.
Nevertheless, the spectacle of distress amongst Black people the world over has also seen a rise in political engagement from immigrant communities with the election of Prime Minister Rob Jetten in the Netherlands and Rima Hassan at the European Union.
These figures are not simply puppets in the political spectrum but rather agents of change who understand the everyday realities of racialised people in a continent that still considers itself white when it refers to the majority becoming a minority. This language alludes to the anxieties that whites in Europe face with lower migration numbers from within Europe, causing negative growth, demographically and economically.
In this sense, the new racialised leaders are aware of the need for migration from the Global South, implying that Europe’s white population is incrementally reduced. Think of Trump’s notion of white genocide in South Africa. This unfolding future gives rise to rhizomatic networks of people power with red lines forming against the rising presence of neo-Nazi movements.
Moreover, the pushback offers us an opportunity to reimagine a world based on social justice with glocal institutional governance that is based on ubuntu (mutual recognition: I am because you are) with a respect for all life on Earth. This reimagining is also founded on self-reflexiveness and accountability because to break away from the colonial system, we need to have shared values that can secure the future from within the present.
In light of the above, SPARK communities hold value in the ways in which we negotiate sociality of love and recognition: ubuntu in praxis; theoretical framings that emanate from Black radical feminists such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks.
These radical forms of resistance based on self-love are some of the tools that are needed in building solidarity and resistance to the old-world order while we navigate the interregnum. SPARK and Foundation ENAR have had the insight to lead the charge and prepare us for a world that is more caring, nurturing and life-affirming.
In the current context as well as in the coming years, SPARK members will have to ask ourselves, what space does SPARK hold in a changing Europe? And, what potentiality lies in this moment in history?
As a member of the SPARK community, I believe that social solidarity in times of geopolitical upheaval is where our strength and efforts should be focused. When we pull our resources together, as in the examples of anti-colonial struggles, those lessons applied to our communities show us how we can push back against fascism and impunity to geno/ecocide. May those lessons remain with us as we navigate a new Europe in a new world order.
*****
I was born Black in apartheid South Africa.
