Sophie Kabangu

Biography

Sophie Kabangu is a PhD researcher at the University of the Arts London. Her doctoral project, Protest as Performance: Practices of Assembly in the Black Arts Movement and Black Lives Matter, explores the relationship between artistic expression, political activism, and grassroots organising in Black British protest movements.

Focusing on the UK’s Black Arts Movement and the Black Lives Matter movement (2014–2020), Sophie’s research examines how racial justice has been advanced through creative and collective practices of assembly. Drawing on the Iniva archive as a central resource, the project traces a genealogy of protest-performance, interrogating the connections between historical and contemporary organising strategies.
Sophie’s work proposes that organising is not only political but also performative, an often overlooked yet generative space where protest artefacts, aesthetics, and collective identities are formed. Her research positions these acts of organising as context-specific, collaborative art forms that emerge from necessity and solidarity.

Through this lens, the project investigates how organising operates as a distinct aesthetic-political practice—mobilising people, articulating dissent, and fostering agency, empowerment, and community.