Season 1
09 Anti-racist communication
In the ninth episode, Wilson Borja and Fabiola Fernández Guerra talk with Mónica about how to communicate racism without reproducing it, sharing the creative and political process behind the campaign and animated film The Structures We Carry Within.
About the episode
How can we talk about racism without repeating it? What makes a campaign really anti-racist? In this episode, Mónica talks with Wilson Borja and Fabiola Fernández Guerra, co-creators of the campaign The Structures We Carry Within, a project imagined and led by Mónica, and developed collectively between the three of them.
From their own trajectories – illustration, activism, animation and campaign production – Wilson and Fabiola reflect on representation, images that hurt and others that open up possibilities. They also share the creative process behind the project's animated film, and how thinking about internalized oppression from emotions, childhood, and relationships helps us imagine new ways to collaborate. Overall, it is an intimate and collective conversation about the difficult, the urgent and the possible in anti-racist communication.
Mentioned in this episode:
Hola magazine (photo)
Soho magazine (photo)
Skin Colour (Color Piel) - mentioned by Wilson Borja
Anti-racist and anti-oppressive strategies in childhood and youth (project) - mentioned by Fabiola
Christian Scott , K.K.P.D. (Youtube, Spotify)
Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
Outside (‘Afuera’ original song by Los Caifanes), Huicatl TV
About the speakers
Wilson Borja
Wilson Borja is a visual artist and animator. He is a former Fulbright scholar with a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Arkansas. He currently combines his artistic practice with teaching at the Faculty of Arts at the National University of Colombia. His research work explores different nuances of the phenomenon of migration and the African diaspora through drawing, painting, engraving and animation.
Website
Fabiola Fernández Guerra Carrillo
Fabiola Fernández Guerra Carrillo is a Mexican, mestizo and white woman, researcher and lecturer on issues of gender, racism, and discrimination, and social communicator. She is the founder and director of the communication agency 11.11 Cambio Social, founding partner of Comparte una Ola A.C., member of the COPERA collective and the REIR Network.
She works on issues of anti-racist communication, gender and discrimination, strategies and new anti-oppressive and anti-racist narratives, and family trees, ancestors and processes of collective healing. She is currently doing a postdoctoral degree at the Center for Transdisciplinary Research in Psychology at the UAEM.
WebsiteAbout the hosts
Mónica Moreno Figueroa
Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa is a Black, mixed-race Mexican woman who has lived in the United Kingdom for over 25 years. She is currently a Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. In 2010, she co-founded the COPERA Collective, an initiative dedicated to making racism in Mexico visible and transforming it from a collective, emotional, and structural perspective. Through COPERA, she promotes public campaigns, media interventions, training programs, and consulting services to advance an anti-racist agenda.
Her research explores the lived and intersectional experience of race and racism in Mexico and Latin America, with a particular interest in anti-racism and its impact within and beyond academia. She also works on feminist theory, intersectionality, and the emotional effects of oppression. She is an expert in qualitative methods and visual methodologies and is known for fostering interdisciplinary collaborations that link critical thinking with social action.
She is currently leading the creation of the Global Racisms Institute for Social Transformation (GRIST), a space for research, collaboration, and action aimed at imagining and building anti-racist futures from a global perspective.
WebsiteThe Structure Within podcast was conceived by Mónica Moreno Figueroa and produced by Fabiola Fernández Guerra Carrillo and Arfaxad Ortiz. The opening credits are voiced by Gabriela García.