Our Time Is Now: Anne Karpf, Selma James and Sanah Ahsan

For over 60 years, Selma James has been fighting for the unwaged women who reproduce the human race and are all but ignored in every culture around the world. Unless these women are protected and supported, future generations of women and children face dire consequences.

A celebration of James’s incredible work, this not-to-be-missed event sees the world-renowned social activist in conversation with Dr Anne Karpf, professor of life writing and culture at London Metropolitan University, and award-winning poet and clinical psychologist Sanah Ahsan, as they explore James’s much-anticipated new anthology, Our Time is Now: Sex, Race, Class and Caring for People and the Planet.

About The Speakers

Anne Karpf is a writer, sociologist and award-winning journalist. Her five books of nonfiction have been translated into 13 languages. Author of How Women Can Save the Planet, Anne is Professor of Life Writing and Culture at London Metropolitan University.

Selma James is an anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist campaigner. In 1972 she put forward Wages for Housework (WFH) as a political perspective that redefined the working class to include all who work without wages, starting with women, the primary carers everywhere. The International WFH Campaign she founded (which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year) co-ordinates the Global Women’s Strike. With her husband and colleague C. L. R. James, she worked in the English-speaking Caribbean for independence and federation from 1958 to 1962. Her first anthology, Sex, Race, and Class – The Perspective of Winning was published in 2012. Her second, Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet was published in 2021, both by PM Press. They focus on what can be learnt from decades of building an international network. On International Women’s Day, City of Women London renamed Kentish Town Station after Selma James, the nearest tube station to the Crossroads Women’s Centre where she is based.

Dr Sanah Ahsan is an award-winning poet, clinical psychologist, presenter, and educator. Her work is centred on compassion, troubling our colonial understandings of mental health, and embracing each other’s madness. Her psychological practice is rooted in liberation and community psychology, drawing on therapeutics, poetics, and post-activism as interconnected practices to support racialised and marginalised people. Her published research explores the deconstruction of whiteness within UK clinical psychology.​​