04 Oct

13:00

Felix Meritis

Keizersgracht 324, Amsterdam

A festival celebrating 15 years of OneWorld with the theme 'CELEBRATE RESISTANCE!', featuring lectures, panels, workshops, film, and music focused on righteous journalism.

OneWorld Festival 2026

More info & tickets

October 4th is the day: OneWorld Festival 2026! After two sold-out editions, the need to come together for righteous journalism is still great. This time, the theme is: 'CELEBRATE RESISTANCE!'

Because OneWorld is celebrating its 15th anniversary, and resistance unfortunately remains essential in times of increasing fascism, genocide, and oppression worldwide. OneWorld Festival inspires and motivates to offer informed resistance.

The program includes the very first OneWorld Lecture by Gloria Wekker, numerous (international) guests (names to be announced!), and panels with figures like Nadia Bouras and Sylvana Simons. There will also be workshops by Zoë Papaikonomou, a film premiere with Jerry Afriyie, theater, a book market, tunes from DJ Disco Arabesquo, and of course, delicious food.

Gloria Wekker is a prominent Afro-Surinamese Dutch academic, writer, and activist whose foundational work heavily intersects with queer studies, Black feminism, and intersectionality. As a scholar and organizer, she has spent decades documenting and analyzing the lives of Black, migrant, and refugee queer women in the Netherlands and the Caribbean diaspora.

Key Contributions to Queer History & Scholarship

Sister Outsider (1984): In 1984, Wekker co-founded Sister Outsider, an influential literary and activist group specifically for Black, migrant, and refugee women who love women. Named after a book by her major inspiration, African-American queer theorist Audre Lorde, the collective provided an essential, safe space outside of the predominantly white mainstream Dutch feminist and gay liberation movements.
Research on Mati Work: In her award-winning book The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (2006), Wekker explored the Creole working-class practice of mati work in Suriname. Mati are women who engage in sexual and emotional relationships with other women but may also have relationships with men. Wekker argued that mati work challenges Western, rigid understandings of "lesbian" or "queer" identity by framing sexuality as behavior and a fluid life-world rather than a fixed, lifelong label.
Intersectional Pioneer: Appointed as a professor at Utrecht University in 2001, she became the first woman of color to hold a professorship in the Netherlands. Her teaching and public intellect introduced Dutch academia to intersectionality—the reality that race, gender, class, and sexuality are interconnected and cannot be analyzed in isolation.

Her lifelong impact on anthropology, queer theory, and Black diasporic studies is celebrated in The Gloria Wekker Reader (Duke University Press, 2026), which compiles her extensive writings on empire, race, and sexuality. Wekker's work is preserved as a cornerstone of queer history through archives like With Pride - IHLIA LGBT Heritage