The 2025 Annual Gloria Carpenter Lecture

NB: This is the in-person attendance page. If you wish to attend online, please use this link to book your place.

The University is pleased to announce that the 2025 Annual Gloria Carpenter Lecture will take place on 10 November 2025, at 5.30pm, at Selwyn College.

Professor Monica Moreno Figueroa's lecture, A Space That Makes Space for Transformation: Rethinking Racisms and the Challenge of Collaboration, explores how we can create spaces that make space — for listening, connecting, and relating — in the face of racisms and inequality. 

Rather than reproducing the extractive and competitive logics that dominate academia and public life, Professor Monica Moreno Figueroa will share experiments in research and practice that place curiosity, collaboration, and transformation at their core. Drawing on global and relational perspectives, the talk considers how dismantling the logics of racisms and related inequalities requires not only analysis but also new ways of working together, cultivating communities of care, and embracing the emotional dimensions of oppression.

About the Speaker

Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa is a Black-mestiza, Mexican-British, woman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She is also a Fellow in Social Sciences at Downing College, Cambridge.

Her research focuses on the intersectional lived experience of ‘race’ and racism in Mexico and Latin America; antiracism and academic-based impact; feminist theory, intersectionality and racism. She is an expert in qualitative research methods, visual methodologies and thrives in interdisciplinary collaborations. She is now learning all about design thinking for social transformation.

Mónica is currently leading the development of the Global Racisms Institute for Social Transformation (GRIST), established with seed funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Through a series of “experiments”, she and the team are shaping the Institute’s vision and methodology, foregrounding curiosity, collaboration and transformation to generate innovative approaches to studying global racisms and translating research into action-oriented dialogues and practices.

The Annual Gloria Carpenter Lecture

The lecture celebrates Gloria Claire Carpenter who was the first Black woman at the University of Cambridge. A Jamaican, she studied law at Girton College in 1945, and became a prominent social reformer, playing an instrumental role in the foundation of the Law Faculty of the University of West Indies in Jamaica.

Please note that the event is governed by the values in the University Code of Practice on Freedom of Speech

Event page image: Andre Hunt/Unsplash