The Revolutionary Life of Grace Lee Boggs

An intergenerational conversation on transformative ideas and action

Friday, February 20 / 3:00 - 4:30 PM (ET)

Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015) was a Chinese-American philosopher and activist who spent more than seventy years engaged in the most transformative revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, playing an especially prominent role in the Detroit Black Power Movement. Her influence on the radical thought emerging from and informing a century of labor and civil rights struggle is profound. In this virtual event, we bring together three scholars to share with us their research on the legacies of this remarkable woman’s ideas and activism.

Our Guests:

MEENA KRISHNAMURTHY is an Associate Professor at Queen's University and Associate Editor at the Journal of Applied Philosophy. She's a political philosopher who studies how people, institutions, and societies transform—and why they resist change. Her research examines civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and Grace Lee Boggs to understand how they used words, images, and protest to force a reckoning with injustice and catalyze transformation. At its core, her work asks what it takes to create lasting change in a world that so often resists it.

LILY LUO recently completed a PhD at the University of Connecticut, where she is an organizer with the Graduate Employees Union (GEU), UAW Local 6950. Lily is passionate about relational organizing, transformative pedagogy, and (r)evolutionary imagination. Her dissertation, titled “Learning to Transform: The Revolutionary Legacy of Grace Lee Boggs,” uses various feminist and decolonial methodologies to explore Grace’s legacy through personal reflection, archival research, and conversations with contemporary Detroit activists committed to the visionary organizing that James and Grace Lee Boggs embodied. Lily teaches courses on community organizing, political theory in film, and visionary political imagination. In the past, she has worked as a community organizer and facilitator, fighting for racial and economic justice with seniors and people of faith. 

SUMMER CHAN is an M.A. student in Philosophy at Queen’s University, specializing in the Political and Legal Thought program. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, where she served as a fellow at the Centre for Ethics in the Race, Ethics, and Power project. Her research interests include: Black political thought, philosophy of law, critical social theory, and aesthetics, and her work investigates how notions of legality and legitimacy shape our social world, inform our ideas of belonging, and mediate our discourses on racial harm and communal responsibility. She is currently researching Grace Lee Boggs’ work on city and place in order to understand how spatial politics contribute to effective community building.