Sónia Vaz Borges

Postdoctoral Fellow
Visiting Scholar

Sónia Vaz Borges is a militant interdisciplinary historian and social-political organizer. She received her PhD in History of Education from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU). She is the author of the book Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau 1963–1978 (2019). As a result of her research Vaz Borges co-authored the short films, Navigating the Pilot School” (2016) andMangrove School (2022). She is currently an Assistant Professor in History and Africana Studies Program at Drexel University in Philadelphia (USA). Vaz Borges continues to write on education and liberation struggles and is now developing a book proposal focused on her concept of the “walking archive” and the process of memory and imaginaries.

Connected Events

Ragás, Because the Sea Has No Place to Grab: Sónia Vaz Borges in Conversation with Celina Su

February 25, 2025

Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution with Christina Heatherton

March 28, 2023

Abolition and/as Activism – 2024 CPCP Annual Conference

May 3, 2024

Participating Years

2022–2023

Revolutionary Arts

Wary of making politics an aesthetic in disguise, radical theory and practice have nevertheless embraced all kinds of artistic provocations and traditions in every form and genre. At the same time, the possibility for fundamental change demands a range of interpretive encounters that might elicit meanings for people whom Julius Scott, writing about a different time, described as “disenchanted people casting about for new options.”
2018–2019

Insurgent Solidarities

Given the political challenges of the present, the necessity for a deeper understanding of radical solidarity appears more pressing than ever. Yet while solidarity has been pivotal to social change since at least the Haitian Revolution, how it is articulated has never been less than problematic.
2017–2018

Consciousness and Revolution II

The place of consciousness in radical theory and practice is a subject of significant dispute, as global and local events continue to underline.
2016–2017

Consciousness and Revolution

The place of consciousness in radical theory and practice is a subject of significant dispute. Marx believed that much of what we construe as consciousness is “false,” a rationalization or an ideological reflex that stands between people and the “true material needs” of their life processes. Are consciousness and revolution mediated in the same ways today?