Organized by Wellesley’s departments of Africana Studies and Religious Studies, the conference brings together prominent scholars from across the nation to address Black women’s spirituality, past and present.
Assistant Professor and Distinguished Emerging Scholar of Religious Studies Sheila Otieno was one of eight scholars invited to speak at the 2025 Black Women’s Spirituality in Africa and the Diaspora Conference held at Wellesley College on March 27-28.
Organized by Wellesley’s departments of Africana Studies and Religious Studies, the conference brings together prominent scholars from across the nation to address Black women’s spirituality, past and present.
Otieno’s talk, “Mama Said Knock You Out: Spiritual Agency, Power and Protest,” focused on women and naked protests on the African continent. In it, she sought to dispel some of the confusion surrounding naked protests in the public sphere by discussing the socioethical considerations related to exposing the nude female body to activate and harness spiritual power.
This talk is part of a larger research project addressing women’s roles in protests that inspire social change and in protests demanding communal transformation through Divine intervention and otherworldly power. In her work, Otieno argues that protests establish new moral orderings of communities that challenge longstanding ideals by reconstructing views and perceptions of morality.