Writer, activist and survivor Kamilah Willingham will deliver the 2022 Women’s and Gender Studies annual lecture at 7 p.m., Sept. 21 in the Nebraska Union Auditorium.
The presentation, “Healing from Sexual Trauma: A Dialogue with Kamilah Willingham,” is free and open to the public.
Willingham is a writer, activist and civil rights advocate. Her work is grounded in advancing the rights of survivors of sexual violence in prisons, schools and beyond, highlighting the culture of silence and inequity that dominates social and systemic responses to gender-based violence. In 2016, Kamilah spearheaded the viral social media campaign, #JustSaySorry. This campaign encouraged survivors of campus sexual assaults and gender-based violence to petition for an apology from their institutions, calling attention to the resilience of survivors and the failures of schools to submit to basic measures of accountability.
Her scholarship investigates the consequences of patriarchy and misogyny, at the intersections of race and sex, and illustrates how culture, norms and institutions are complicit in this abuse. Willingham has trained a variety of stakeholders, from prison guards to campus officials, on their responsibilities to prevent and address sexual violence among their ranks and within their environments.
