“Decolonizing Knowledge: Embracing an Insurgent Intellectual Tradition in the Spirit of Ella Baker”

Barbara Ransby, Professor of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of the award-winning biography Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Ransby writes widely for numerous popular and scholarly publications, including Progressive Media Project, which distributes her columns nationally. In addition to the program Eight Forty-Eight on Chicago Public Radio, she has contributed to over a dozen audio and film documentaries. A feminist activist committed to fostering university-community collaborations, Professor Ransby was one of the coordinators of African American Women in Defense of Themselves in 1991, Ella’s Daughters in 2006, and A movement Re-imagining Change (ARC) in 2009.