Suicide and Evidence Seminar Series

Suicide research and prevention is generally driven by statistics, which in the UK and much of the West have historically reported (white cis) men as dying at the highest rates of suicide. In this seminar series, we rethink what constitutes as ‘evidence’ about suicide. We learn from folks researching suicide with populations who are often under-represented in or excluded from suicide statistics. In these cases, we are interested in how evidence on suicide is navigated and reimagined, and what this offers for suicide knowledge production and for people's lives. We also hear in this seminar series from people who are critiquing the statistical status quo of existing (often pathological, white male) evidence on suicide. What becomes possible when we think beyond trying to fit people into existing ways of measuring suicide and unliveability? The Suicide & Evidence Seminar Series is hosted by Dr Emily Yue https://healingjusticeldn.org/team/dr-emily-yue/ find out more about the project here.

25th Feb 2026: Reclaiming Evidence: A Sociological Approach to Suicide Among Black Women in the United States

Dr Kamesha Spates, Department of Africana Studies at University of Pittsburgh

For decades, “evidence” on suicide has been constructed through frameworks that privilege biomedical data, individual pathology, and Western epistemologies. These models have produced vast knowledge gaps about Black women’s lived experiences of suicidality—gaps that are not the absence of evidence but evidence of absence, rooted in epistemic injustice. This presentation offers a more holistic sociological approach that reclaims evidence as both data and lived truth. Drawing on qualitative research, archival histories, and community-based healing practices, I argue that Black women’s narratives of pain, endurance, and resistance constitute critical evidence of the social conditions that render life untenable for some. By situating suicide within structures of racism, gendered violence, and cultural silence, I will illustrate how sociological inquiry expands what counts as “proof” and who gets to produce it.