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AbstractThis article explores the complex entanglements of (bodies of) water and coloniality, indigenous epistemologies and alternative ways of being in recent African poetry, short fiction and performance. Idza Luhumyo’s short story “Five Years Next Sunday” gauges the Black female power to create and contain water against the White male thirst for domination, while Koleka Putuma’s poem “Water” offers a haunting insight into an acknowledgement of the sea as archive. The research-based multi-media project Lalela uLwandle by the Empatheatre Collective meditates on our communal relationship with the ocean in the face of exploitation and resource extraction on the coasts of South Africa. These texts redefine the meaning of bodies of water, broaden the significance of wet matters and offer ways of being otherwise through the aquatic and maritime imagination. This article merges Black African feminist critique, decolonial thought and environmental activism in a tidalectic reading of three artistic interventions in our relationship with water. In thinking with and in water, this article embraces a more fluid understanding of the category of the human and argues for a re-enchanted existence with and within the more-than-human world as well as challenges eco-social injustices through an exploration of hydrocolonialism in contemporary African literature and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the creation of a supportive space for Black men in higher education grounded in love and vulnerability. Topics include the principles behind Communion for Black Men, such as embracing Black feminist love politics, the healing and self-love practices within the community, and the significance of emotional vulnerability and collective care among Black men in academia.

In this article, we introduce city walking as a social work pedagogical methodology that has relevance for engaging with critical feminist inquiry and macro practice. Through two case studies, we examine how city walking offers an alternative social work pedagogy to the often sedentary practices of teaching macro practice or structural social work. City walking opens up local histories and silences that are key to spotlighting genealogies of oppression that are significant to community practitioners. Through engaging with Black feminist theorizations, we reflect upon their potential for advancing locally based collaborative pedagogies and present two case studies (Fresno, California and Gothenburg, Sweden) through the lens of autoethnography. The article first outlines Black feminist theorizations and key concepts, as they provide the basis for the method used in the cases discussed. The article then discusses autoethnography as a method and presents two case studies of city walking as a social work pedagogical method. We find that embodied city walking practices engaged with our shared localities and histories of inequality and resilience. City walking enables an important dialogue that is necessary for more critical feminist social work pedagogies that are aligned with social emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from Black Feminist Thought and Black Girl Cartography the author uses the domain-of-power framework to analyze the Black Girl Charting practices of Cierra, a Black girl student navigating racial history in a secondary classroom in the United States. She encounters the physical space as a site of interpersonal oppression and the U.S. history curriculum as a space of cultural, hegemonic domination. Most importantly, she resists those constraints with her reframing of Blackness, women, and youth through her coursework. After examining Cierra's essay, presentation, exchange with the principal, and responses to interview questions, the author reimagines the focal conversation as a pathway to empowering learning. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the study for Black feminist pedagogy and abolitionist teaching in K-12 education, teacher education, and education research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter highlights, platforms' affordances extend further than UI choices and content formats emphasized. Extant work addresses that political perspectives are implicated in the affordances of platforms; however, the notion of "ideology as/of affordance" requires more scholarly attention, namely, from a Black feminist position which grapples with the raced and gendered dimensions of how such shaping of affordances is understood and experienced in digital contexts. A Black feminist analysis offers a critical intervention that examines the dynamics between ideology, digital culture, and relational experiences of autonomy. Thus, our article outlines how "ideology as/of affordance" is a helpful intervention for illuminating the power relations by which both "cancel culture" and "platform affordances" are defined. Specifically, we explicate how white supremacist ideology underpins platform affordances, which in turn shape who is "canceled," and consider the key connections and disconnections between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the stand-up comedy albums of comedian and blues singer Hattie Noel released in the 1960s. Her career reveals previously unrecognized connections between the classic blues of the 1920s–1930s and the stand-up comedy albums of the 1960s and presents a Black feminist perspective on sexuality and the politics of the civil rights era. Noel's comedy transcends the stereotypes she played in Hollywood films and the dehumanization she faced in her work with Disney. Using the sonic archive of her LPs to understand the history of stand-up comedy offers an alternate narrative about her career. In Hollywood, her legacy was as a "hippo in a tutu," but on stage and on vinyl, she negotiated a space for her voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Treasuring the legacy of Ida B Wells‐Barnett as a Black feminist is a vital liberatory commitment, as previous scholarship has commendably demonstrated. Equally important, however, is the need to present Wells‐Barnett as an anticolonial theorist whose scholarly texts—Southern Horrors, A Red Record, and Crusade for Justice—should be incorporated into social theory curricula. This article examines Wells‐Barnett's acute apprehension of the foundational structures of the US empire‐state in her scholarly writings on lynching. As she analysed, the white mob violence epitomised the co‐re‐formation of race and gender, rule of difference, and subversion of offender‐judge relationship. The agency of non‐state actors (e.g., lynch mobs) and government agents (e.g., judge and politicians) co‐constituted the reformation—not total transformation—of these foundational structures. Lynching, therefore, was the lynchpin of the US empire‐state in the post‐Reconstruction period: it sustained the white supremacist order by imposing a mass death penalty on Black people, while simultaneously serving as a disgrace to US civilization. To conclude, we highlight how Wells‐Barnett's theory offers broader relevance to anticolonial/postcolonial sociology, particularly through her subaltern standpoint, attention to the role of non‐state actors, and her commitment to intersectional analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis critical autoethnography explored the experiences of a Black woman fashion graduate student who occupied space in fashion education for a decade. Observing and living within the movement of proposed diverse, equitable, and inclusive frameworks and action plans, she has managed to survive the complex sociopolitical terrain. Within fashion discourse, proposed shifts in sociocultural and political movements have motivated scholars to begin contemplating and theorizing pathways of decolonization as an attempt to eradicate colonial knowledge frameworks that amplify systemic oppressive structures. To practice a deconstructive, reflective process, she theorizes and demonstrates the importance of centering endarkened and Black feminist and womanist epistemology for enclosing the distance in differences and further developing fashion definitions. The authors determine that factors such as Black feminist and womanist thought, holistic education, the effect of history, honesty, and basic need factors are pathways toward decolonization and freedom. More than research, this study centers a contemporary and analytical narrative that offers directions and implications for the landscape of fashion education and the fashion-industrial complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peer-reviewed journal articles provide the data for this study, given that their findings undergird the quantitative data referenced by prominent organizations, courts, and policy-makers. The "Espy file", based on the research of Major Watt Espy, Jr., is used to identify studies due to the dataset's esteem and prolific usage. It is the largest known dataset of men's and women's executions in the United States since 1608 and has been of monumental significance to capital punishment research. The protocol established by the Preferred Reporting of Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) is the methodology followed due to its conformity to scientific standards and acceptance in scholarly communities. The initial sampling frame involved 613 studies which were narrowed to 79 peer-reviewed journal articles that cited or utilized the Espy file. The empirical findings justify the contention that past and current studies, while interdisciplinary, require new voices and approaches to contribute to the study of capital punishment. Mainstream death penalty research does not generally incorporate critical theories including, for example, gender, intersectional, Black feminist, Queer, and other theories that focus less on quantitative data and more on how capital punishment is a reflection of institutional, historical, and social processes that are hierarchical and defined by power. The findings suggest that not only are executed women removed from many analyses, but so are inclusionary methodologies and theoretical approaches that could bolster the legitimacy of academic studies (inside academia as well as the judicial system) and our understanding of capital punishment in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers L'Évangile du nouveau monde (2021), Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé's last published novel during her lifetime, to be a victory lap of her œuvre, one in which she revisits her greatest thematic and poetic hits, while reaffirming her allegiance to social justice and the freedom of literature. Pascal, the novel's main protagonist, is a floundering full-time messiah and part-time author who travels from the Caribbean to Brazil via New York, bearing witness — albeit poorly — to some of the world's most pressing issues: police brutality, misogyny, xenophobia, exploitative work practices, and more. Behind Pascal's struggles to fulfill his mission to bring harmony to the world with his writings, Condé playfully conceals a capacious literary ethic rooted in humor, as an essential mode of critique, and love, as a Black feminist reading and writing praxis that insists on the complementary roles of intellectual mothers and fathers in the project of global emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language is central to art museum visitor engagement and art interpretation. For university art museums in the United States that primarily exist as teaching and research institutions, language is particularly important in the transference of knowledge and cross-cultural meaning making. Art museums in state universities, much like their national and independent counterparts, have increasingly served more diverse audiences as a by-product of globalization. Using the case study of The Palmer Museum of Art at The Pennsylvania State University as a contested site, I explore some of the barriers of access that museum language presents as a tool of cultural hegemony. When cultural institutions in service to the public perpetuate exclusionary semantic practices, who feels welcomed in these spaces? How do those who are deprived of a sense of belonging navigate these linguistic landscapes? Drawing from a Black feminist perspective, I employed a critical participatory pedagogy in collaboration with university students of color to recast meaning making in art interpretation for museum object labels. I argue that de-centering museum linguistic practices as an intervention of decolonial communication fosters inclusive audience experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates racial-sexual violence, and conceptualizations of Black female subjectivity as they are situated in the cinematic Black political imagination. Through a Black feminist analysis of Get Out (2017), the author argues that the film and its articulation of race in the post-Obama US fails to account for gender and sexuality by tangentially engaging Black women in its dissection of race and racism. The author contends that Black women are the absent presence in the film and utilizes theories of temporal, spatial, and material racial-sexual violence and the coupled subject invisibilities to dissect the (in)visible Black women in film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Black women's collective wisdom has informed Black women's sexual development for decades. Yet, empirical collective wisdom regarding what is needed to reduce their experiences of sexual pain and enhance sexual pleasure has been omitted. This study fills this gap by centering the voices of Black women living in the Southern region of the USA who have experienced sexual difficulties. Methods: We used thematic analysis to find themes across n = 21 in-depth interviews with Black women living in the Southern USA who consented to participate in a mixed methods study focused on Black women's experiences of sexual pain and pleasure. We interviewed participants between January and March 2021. Results: There were five main themes: 1) Talk that talk, 2) On my mama and big mama, 3) Take me to church, 4) Put yourself first, and 5) What about the men? Conclusions: Findings of this study reveal a common desire among Black women who have experienced sexual pain to have safe spaces to talk about sexual health through multigenerational sister circles and in churches. Heterosexual participants also stressed the importance of sexuality education opportunities for Black men. Policy Implications: It is important to understand the systems of oppression that present obstacles to Black women's sexual development and sexual health knowledge acquisition. Equitable funding for Black women's sexual health programs, and using multiplatform approaches to reach multiple generations and center the voices of Black women, are crucial to advancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study analyzed what shaped the aspirations of Black women graduate student alumnae to earn advanced degrees. Using an assets-based conceptual framework of Community Cultural Wealth and Black Feminist Thought, findings suggested that the aspirational capital of Black women alumnae who obtained advanced degrees was fueled by other familial, navigational, resistance, and social capital and that they also implemented notions of Black feminisms within their trajectories into graduate education. Additionally, by bridging Community Cultural Wealth and Black Feminist Thought, the data suggests a new form of capital, which we call community uplift capital, that is rooted in elevating one’s community, family, and culture. The findings have implications for the recruitment and retention of Black graduate students and for stakeholders associated with graduate education matriculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Black women scholars, like bell hooks, have been subjected to academic capitalist white supremacist patriarchal values that minimizes and invalidates the epistemologies, theories, methods, and knowledge production processes of Black women. Thus, as a means to move past antiquated theorization and knowledge production practices, I proposed a pathway forward by introducing a "bell hooksian approach" to higher educational research that is based on four "hooksian love typologies" (love as an active choice, revolutionary self-love, familial, and romantic) rooted in the scholarship of Black feminist theorist bell hooks. This framework helps to better understand and research the multifaceted conceptualizations of love that can assist and better support Black women and women of color on college campuses and in the academy more generally. Lastly, asserting that notions of love is a central aspect of Black life, I made recommendations for researchers and practitioners on how to utilize a love-centered hooksian approach within qualitative inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tradwives have been the thorn in feminism’s side ever since they exploded onto the social media landscape in 2013, attracting considerable media attention post-COVID. With their growing popularity in the online influencer space, the movement has been a critical focus of feminist academic discourse, given their promotion of ‘traditional’ values. Adopting a black feminist lens, this article traces the construction of the tradwife as anti-feminist populism and given the complexity of defining tradwives, offers a typology to better understand sub-types of content creators. Three clear sub-types of tradwives are identified: 1) the nostalgic tradwife, 2) the former feminist and finally 3) the Southern Belle. It also examines the unassuming hyperfeminine aesthetic within the tradwife persona that allows tradculture to perpetuate alt-right ideology to an everyday audience. This article argues that some tradwives bury their heads in the sand by failing to consider how nostalgic constructions of ‘traditional’ femininity reproduce colonialist discourses, as well as modes of oppression through gendered, ethnic and class lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lemonade (2016) is a genre-blending text that imports cultural and fantastical devices in order to revise, interrogate, and re-examine history–specifically, the traumas inherited from enslavement. In its analysis of history, Lemonade immortalizes Afrodiasporic spiritual practices and enshrines Black women-healers and magic-users as folk heroes. This work advances that the Afrodiasporic spiritual practices and gynocentric connections are used to form Black female collectives. It draws largely on Black and Africana feminist and womanist scholarship to frame an expanded discussion of spirituality and Black motherhood in the American South, and to demonstrate how collectives–sacred, transhistorical communities–are critical to Black female healing. It contextualizes Lemonade’s “chapters,” visuals, and wider narrative, and it examines the Southern psychic and epistemological resources that Beyoncé, as protagonist, consults. In doing so, this work ultimately intends to create new intellectual space for readers to revisit questions of collectivity in Lemonade and consider the indispensability of community for Black women and girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a young Black disabled woman's performance practices on TikTok through the lens of critical digital labor studies, disability studies, and Black feminist writings. Starting from the observation that this woman, whom I call Kyla in the paper, deliberately stages her disability – an amputated leg – on TikTok, not least to prove that this can make her an 'influencer,' I analyze how Kyla engages her amputated/prosthetic leg in TikTok dance content, how she navigates the attention she receives in reaction to this, including some people's ableist call for 'story time,' in which she is supposed to tell the story of 'what happened to her leg,' and, finally, how she 'performs back' at her audience, society at large, and TikTok itself through producing performative content that reveals and problematizes what it means for her, as a young Black disabled woman, to produce content on TikTok and live with a disability in the US today. Building upon this analysis, I argue that Kyla's content production practices critically and creatively engage the fine line between the possibility of disability entrepreneurialism and disability resistance on TikTok and thus effectively 'crip' the platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by the three core tenets of a Black feminist love-politic, this article offers a framework of communion for Black men within higher education. Emanating from the embodied experiences of Black men in academe participating in the "site" of communion (i.e. The Gathering) through an Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) virtual symposium session, four core dimensions of theory emerged: spiritual, relational, material, and political. Life-notes from each session participant are used to capture each dimension of communion. Implications for praxis related to the spiritual and material well-being of Black men within higher education are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black Queer people’s reproductive experiences are largely under-documented and under-reported in health communication research, despite the omnipresence of their storytelling within humanities-based literature. Drawing from a larger health study using Black feminist perspectives and centering Black Queer people’s lived experiences with reproduction, previous health research, and Black Queer poetics, this study uses an art-based research approach to create erasure poems that detail how Black Queer birthing people resist and survive reproductive-based injustices. Specifically, through this innovative approach, I construct eight erasure poems developed from the previous insights of Black Queer people’s answer to “What is the future of reproduction?” These poems detail unparalleled truths about the needs and strategies that necessitate efforts to improve reproductive justice for my community. The poems detail Black Queer people’s discussions of the importance of community networks along our reproductive health journeys, creating new conceptualizations of motherhood and parenthood, new understandings of reproductive-based stigma and oppression, and our use of spirituality as a tool for reclaiming reproductive autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surviving R. Kelly (Part I) (SRK) was intended to amplify the voices of tens of Black and Latino women who have faced sexualized violence at the hands of singer Robert Kelly. The creators hoped to highlight the fact that these women's testimonies had been deemed untrustworthy by the American legal system, and accosted within mainstream American media. Given that a lack of mainstream outrage regarding the violent experiences of Black women is neither new nor isolated to those victimized by Kelly, and considering that SRK documents the stories of visibly Black women, the docuseries constitutes a potential space for resistance to the harms perpetrated against Black girls and women overall. Thus, I will use a feminist critical theoretical lens to examine the extent to which SRK disrupts the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal paradigm within which Black girls' and women's accounts of sexualized violence are systematically denied credibility and/or attention. I argue that, while SRK begins to critique the harmful social norms that hinder the testimonies of Black victims/survivors from being both heard and believed, the docuseries falls short of holding responsible both the people and the systems complicit in the marginalization of Black female victims/survivors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to Dustin Garnet's (2015) article "Polyptych Construction as Historical Methodology" in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, this paper aims to insert citations of feminist theories into the record of polyptych methodology. Examples from Black Feminist Theorists offer models of form to polyptych construction. The author further illustrates how they implement polyptych methodology and form in their art education historical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece offers a space for critical debate and reflection on the methodological and epistemological foundations that underpin feminist research on conflict, violence and peace. Taking stock of the variety of approaches and theoretical standpoints, we examine the (feminist) politics of knowledge production in academia and its limitations. We discuss how ontological and epistemological assumptions shape what counts as (feminist) academic knowledge and what is considered to be possible in (policy) practice. The article makes three contributions. First, we argue that the production of knowledge within disciplinary boundaries, and in particular, International Relations, is closely related to the discipline's history of positivism and exclusion. Second, to counter that, we propose a close engagement with Black and decolonial feminist methods of feeling-knowing, storytelling and collaboration. Third, we highlight that embracing uncertainty means accepting incommensurability and heterogeneity, as well as a shift away from the urge to accumulate knowledge towards paying attention to the process of co-constructing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We discuss reproductive justice in the context of Finland, a Nordic welfare state often considered as having achieved exceptionally high ethical standards in reproductive health and overall justice. Every now and then, however, this reproduction is interrupted by ghosts in the machine: the problems, past and present, of marginalised, racialised, and/or otherwise non-normative people whose presences provoke specific Finnish hauntings, seething presences of reproductive injustice that suggest something is to be done. Instead of offering data analysis, this article aims to envision transformative reproductive justice futures through processual, collaborative theory development. This study uses an intersectional lens to understand how interlocking systems of oppression shape our lived experiences through an interdisciplinary, ethical analysis that suggests that what is required to resolve such hauntings is moral vigilance and care for a consistent reproductive justice orientation in global solidarity. Specifically in Finland, it requires the willingness to disavow the imperative to protect Finnish whiteness and active and meaningful solidarity across differences. Building on Black feminist and queer thought, we urge queer white people who may be tempted to become enfolded by homonationalism to take a more encompassing view of reproductive justice for a more sustainable welfare state ethic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay engages contemporary narratives of black maternal ambivalence to unsettle residual attachments to choice within the frame of reproductive justice. The contemporary fiction of Brit Bennett's The Mothers and Tayari Jones's An American Marriage, as well as Black feminist work on Assisted Reproductive Technologies, reconsider the difficult ways that race and 'choice' have been in tension with each other in political and medical discourse around reproductive rights. Feminist choice debates have been intentionally reframed away from 'rights' and toward 'justice' as an attempt to account for the hyper-control of Black reproduction across a modern history that includes enslavement, mass incarceration, and myths of hyper-reproduction. Complex narrative accounts of thwarted or uncertain Black reproduction built from the embodied experiences of blackness can consider both choice and justice without romanticising motherhood or autonomy. This article troubles the weight on black feminism to conceive and carry children – symbolic and material – into and through precarious life chances into secure (political) futures. Through thick descriptions of the reproductive that run through desire, uncertainty, debt, and vulnerability, black feminist thought and expressive culture can displace autonomy as the underpinning and endgame of feminist reproductive politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article posits self-care as a powerful analytic in contemporary anthropology, one that provides insight into both long-standing anthropological concerns about the person, power, and inequality and more contemporary questions about relationality, futurity, and anthropology itself. The cascade of crises that defines the now results in a collective preoccupation with care, the self, and self-care. In this moment, the work of scholars who have long theorized systemic abandonment and the unequal distribution of care is crucial not just to understanding the present but to imagining a new way forward. Proposing what an anthropology of self-care might look like, we start with the term's emergence in Black feminist thought and Foucault's late writing. We then explore how it moves through anthropology and how it has been defined by Indigenous, disability, queer, and Black feminist epistemologies. We end with sections on what we term literatures of refusal and self-care's relation to these. We thus argue that self-care provides a unique angle through which to grapple with the discipline's legacy and to imagine a new anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afro-descendant women in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, are amongst the most marginalized groups in the country. Living in a region severely affected by environmental degradation due to multiple and overlapping forms of resource extraction, they also face the impacts of drug-trafficking conflicts crossing the Colombian border, as well as institutional and everyday racism. Many of these conditions are rooted in a long history of colonialism. In this article, we highlight the relative absence of Afro-Ecuadorian women's voices, histories and experiences from research on resource extraction and argue that Black feminist theoretical approaches provide an essential tool for understanding intersections of gender, race and activism, as well as (alternatives to) development, and the impacts of natural resource extraction in Ecuador. In so doing, the article proposes a theoretical framework to open up spaces that situate Afro-Ecuadorian women's knowledge at the centre of efforts to resist marginalization and extractivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article commemorates the legacy of bell hooks by bringing core themes in her oeuvre to bear on several debates on the conceptualization and use of qualitative research methods in sociology. Despite the uptake of qualitative research methods in sociology as a launching point for critical inquiry with analytical and political overtones, they have been fragmented threefold by debates about their politics (whether to humanize research subjects), practice (whether to intervene in field research), and epistemology (procedural, craft, and bricolage orientations). Reflecting on the legacy of bell hooks, this article articulates a Black feminist approach by unearthing methodological and epistemological themes underwritten in hooks' work (inclusive pedagogy, creative dialogue, and reflexive accountability) to offer new perspectives on the three debates and, in so doing, to identify ways to better qualitative research methods as tools for emancipating the marginalized – by invigorating cross-professional and transdisciplinary dialogue, collaboration, and love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Black feminist critical inquiry, I theorize the politics of race, gender, and geography in the context of a liberatory Black pedagogical space located in the United States. Using curated interview and observation data, I position an anti-racist pedagogue as a cartographer who employed method, content, style, and technique to map freedom routes away from schooling, a Dumasian site of suffering for Black students. I paint a narrative portrait that foregrounds sights, sounds, and felt tensions emerging from two manifestations of Black affective networks that constellated in the Black male critical pedagogue's classroom. Ultimately, I call for attention to the construction of liberatory education spaces created to address the comfort and needs of not only racially minoritized learners but also students who embody sexes, genders, and gender performances marginalized in white-dominant culture. Such pedagogical spaces, I argue, can be a refusal to indulge the ontological, epistemological, and existential project of whiteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delves into the possibilities and challenges of digital media for the Black feminist movement in Brazil in an era of data colonialism and the rise of the far right. Barros asks: how does communicating through social media and the web alter how we relate to each other, the way we organize and perform political acts, and defend our rights, including the right to communicate and to inform? In response, Barros shares a vision and explores the conditions of possibility for a diverse and nonextractive digital sphere to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have drawn on youth voice as a way of learning about educational inequity from the perspective of those closest to it. Yet, methodological engagements with youth voice tend to elide considerations of how coloniality and raciality operate in the very interpretive strategies leveraged to represent youth voice in academic knowledge produced about inequity. Following anticolonial black feminist critique and method-making, the inquirer turns to a radical reading practice for engaging youth feedback at a summer achievement program dedicated to promoting racial and educational justice and reversing summer learning loss. Key to this radical reading practice are methodological and analytical moves that: (a) pivot from earlier interpretations of youth feedback; (b) trace raciality in educational text to demonstrate how the text relies on modern signifying strategies that hide Man, his descriptive statements for existence, and the attendant power structures that facilitate global capital; and (c) consider how youth feedback illustrates coloniality and raciality at work within the out-of-school program. In all, the paper demonstrates how a black inquiry approach complicates educational equity's federally mandated, state-monitored, and locally enacted pursuit at an out-of-school program to collectively consider alternatives to our current ethical-political education demands, and how we might engage the task of posing those alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse around Black History in Florida's public schools and public spaces has been notably controversial and in high demand in recent years. Black museums are few in the Tampa Bay area, making the Woodson African American History Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, a community treasure. The Woodson Museum partnered with the Montague Collection, launching Women's History Month in March 2024 by featuring the "Sister Gertrude Morgan: A Ministry of Divergence" exhibition. This exhibit centers on religion, rhythms, and artistry. Sister Gertrude Morgan was an African American, New Orleans‐based, multidisciplinary artist and street evangelist from the late 1950s to the mid‐1970s. Morgan repurposed the streets into her muse, medium, pulpit, and exhibition space in a way that can serve as a Black museum praxis framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent works in and around Black feminist and queer studies have explored the figure of unbearable life through different forms of forgetting. A forgetting attends every act of conceptual or cultural invention, but forgetting also marks a range of cognitive deteriorations in and around experiences of disability, death, and dying. Working between the discourses of afro-fabulation, afropessimism, and Black feminism, the article details the ways every act of invention is also a form of forgetting, and every instance of loss is also a form of creativity. Afro-fabulation, as one name for a Black queer mode of invention, is at once a mode of creating bearable forms of life from abjection, and a form of forgetting. In their shared attention to cognitive deterioration and death as forms of loss, Black feminism and afropessimism open space for reckoning with the impermanence and indeterminacy central to the Black radical tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The starting point of this essay is the author's acknowledgment that Evelynn Hammonds's "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality" has been a throughline for her scholarly and personal development. That relationship to Hammonds's text and its author shifts, and the changing nature of these connections marks important milestones in Bailey's academic and adult life. The essay waxes poetic about the substance of Hammonds's "Black (W)holes" as its meanings exceed its arguments: its very writing serves as a possibility model both in terms of the kind of scholarship Bailey imagined she could write and the kind of life she could live as one keen to bridge Black feminism and medicine. "Black (W)holes" is one of the first academic writings where Bailey saw herself reflected, both in the content presented and in the identities held by Hammonds. Black alphabet children of Spelman College, straddling the line between medical science and feminism, Hammonds and Bailey have much in common. Hammonds's essay inspired Bailey to want to get to know the now legendary alumna, and this essay recounts how she embarked on a campaign to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay employs the autotheoretical critique of the university and celestial cartography pioneered in Evelynn Hammonds's "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality" to understand the dynamic relationship between the silencing of black academics and black women/feminists in various sites of the neoliberal university. Narrating two experiences at Ivy League institutions, this essay meditates on the voids created and inhabited when the gravity of black study's insistence on blackness as essential to the construction of modernity collapsed into and under the name of Afropessimism. The essay interrogates how looking for the distortion of the academic spaces that surround and engage black thought—namely, American studies, ethnic studies, and women and gender studies—renders visible (presuming we have the right instruments) the production of black (w)holes. Finally, it is interested in how the black intramural's gender dynamics and the heteropatriarchy of its surrounds continue to silence black feminists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay returns to Evelynn Hammonds's field-changing essay "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality," with a focus on the labor of knowledge production under fraught institutional conditions, characterized in this essay as languaging. The simultaneous desire for and impossibility of accurate language to describe racialized, gendered, and sexual subjectivity drive Hammonds's essay as well as a number of other key texts in Black feminist sexuality studies. This essay (re)introduces the diagnostic category of dysphoria to speak to this paradox: here, dysphoria describes the affective and psychic condition of institutional illegibility and fungibility for racialized and gendered people. Using the analytic of dysphoria to characterize and connect the political economy of Black feminist knowledge production and the life narrative of A. Dionne Stallworth, a Black trans woman activist, this essay directs urgent attention to the simultaneously material, spiritual, psychic, and affective dimensions of self-, knowledge-, and world-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Special educators are increasingly drawing from intersectionality and Black feminist theory to make sense of the disproportionate deleterious outcomes experienced by racialized students labeled with disabilities. While intersectionality gains a stronger hold in special education discourse, agencies like the Florida Department of Education are misrepresenting Black feminist theory and intersectionality as "ranking people" based on their social identities. Audre Lorde—a member of The Combahee River Collective credited for generating an intersectional shift in feminist discourse—called on the creative use of difference to push back on the marginalization of multiply-marginalized women. Lorde asserted that explicitly attending to the diversity within human experiences challenges harmful attitudes that frame differences as markers of inferiority, deviance, or failure. In this article, I draw from Black feminism and Audre Lorde's theorizing about difference to present a framework for educators who advocate for specialized education programming that affirm student differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Streets Belong to Us makes a significant contribution to multiple fields, most principally the history of race, gender, sexuality, incarceration, and state violence in the United States. It is a definitive history of the changing nature of police power, and the ways that it defined, defended, and enforced the logics that undergirded racial segregation. Illuminating the significant degree to which urban policymaking and planning depended on state violence, Anne Fischer compels us to better appreciate the relation between the making and the remaking of the modern city and the consolidation of police power. To do so, we must see that this connection was made possible through the surveillance, harassment, and sexual criminalization of Black women. Women's bodies, particularly Black women's bodies, acted as the constitutive material that made up the very fabric of state power and racial segregation. Along with presenting an analysis of the racial and gendered dimensions of morals law enforcement, The Streets Belong to Us moves Black women out of the shadows of urban history by grounding the analysis within the intellectual production by Black feminist organizers and scholars. Their concept of gendered anti-Blackness proved indispensable to feminist antiviolence struggles of the late twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although emerging research on families of color explores internalized oppression and resistance, there is a gap in the literature on these phenomena's incidence among Kanaka ̒Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) ̒ohana (families) and the Lāhui (Hawaiian people, nation). Furthermore, scholars have yet to contextualize internalized oppression and resistance as huikau (confusion) and kū̒ē (to oppose, protest, resist), respectively. This conceptual article thus addresses this research gap while interweaving metaphors from Black feminist and Indigenous literature. This article provides a historical analysis of how internalized oppression and huikau came to afflict Kanaka ̒Ōiwi (Native Hawaiians) and conceptualizes the potentiality for kū̒ē at the ̒ohana dimension to generate a widespread disruption of huikau in communities and the Lāhui for collective social change. This conceptualization is offered as a culturally responsive intervention for educators, social workers, and health practitioners who engage with Kanaka ̒Ōiwi ̒ohana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the mechanisms of white supremacy within digital spaces in relation to the body/embodiment, social justice movements, and the nature and expression of contemporary feminism. New digital political economies work through social media such as Instagram to colonise, disempower and obscure the work of Black feminists in the sphere of fat liberation (re‐framed as 'body positivity'), and in terms of imperatives for self‐care, which have been co‐opted by an emerging online wellness industry. I call to account the pervasiveness of neoliberal logics which are re‐shaping (post)feminism and re‐inscribing white supremacy onto bodies online and offline through 'disciplined whiteness'. This paper explores the mechanisms of white supremacy within digital spaces in relation to the body/embodiment, social justice movements, and the nature and expression of contemporary feminism. New digital political economies work through social media such as Instagram to colonise, disempower, and obscure the work of Black feminists in the sphere of fat liberation (re‐framed as 'body positivity'), and in terms of imperatives for self‐care, which have been co‐opted by an emerging online wellness industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women of color in higher education face unique challenges shaped by gender bias, stereotypes, underrepresentation, and other complexities of intersectional identities. Grounded in the Black feminist lens, this conceptual framework highlights the critical importance of cultivating inclusive campus culture and promoting a strong sense of belonging. Establishing an equitable and inclusive campus culture is essential for advancing the academic success and psychosocial wellbeing of women of color in academia, as highlighted by the existing literature. In this paper, we propose a three-pronged approach to accomplish this goal: (a) generating awareness through education and training, (b) adopting inclusive and Black feminist pedagogy, and (c) implementing institutional changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hollywood has been instrumental in the construction of Blackness on screen, often perpetuating myths, stereotypes, and negative images about the Black experience, showcasing Black people as aggressive, unloving, and incapable of maintaining a healthy romantic relationship. With more diversity efforts in Hollywood, Black women have become more empowered to reshape those narratives. So, what happens when these women intentionally provide a diverse representation of Blackness? What depictions of Blackness and love are prevalent when Black women drive the story? Using Black Feminist Thought as a theoretical framework, this essay examines the narratives surrounding love in the films The Photograph and Really Love (2020), both written and directed by Black women. Using thematic analysis of the film's narratives, cinematography, casting, sound design, and character development, this study found the films Really Love (2020) and The Photograph (2020) offer a new conception of Black Love in Hollywood. These deliberate considerations demonstrate the intention Black women film writers take in depicting a full expression of Blackness, including romantic and intimate relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police violence shapes the lives of racial and ethnic minorities, and while much has been written about strategic responses to police, missing is an examination of how black women navigate interactions with officers. Based on 32 interviews with black women, we find that they use witnessing, or the mobilization of others as observers to police encounters. Research demonstrates the rising role of videos and smartphones in documenting encounters with officers. We find that black women adapt witnessing techniques based on their surroundings, available resources, and network contacts. Three forms of witnessing are observed: physical witnessing , mobilizing others in close proximity to interactions with officers; virtual witnessing , using cellphone or social media technology to contact others or record interactions with officers; and institutional witnessing , leveraging police or other institutional contacts as interveners to interactions with officers. Black women mobilize witnessing to deescalate violence, gather evidence, and promote accountability. Attuned to both the interactional and structural dynamics of police encounters, black women conceptualize witnessing as a way to survive police encounters and navigate their legal estrangement within the carceral system. We theorize black women's witnessing as a form of resistance as they work to reconfigure short- and long-term power relations between themselves, their communities, and police. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As scholars, teachers, and researchers within academe we have, at times, felt the gravity, nuance, and depth of Black feminist theories and epistemologies have resulted in articulations and manifestations so flat they are rendered illegible and almost always universally synonymous. While there are certainly deep and rich connections among and between Black feminist theories, and while their proliferation has been often mutually facilitative, they are worthy of distinction. Our paper explores how the genealogy of Black women's theorizing has survived through its varying conceptualizations through explicating Womanism; Black Feminist Thought; and Endarkened Feminisms. We illustrate the genealogy of Black women's theorizing and suggest moving away from the singular meanings that, ultimately, reduce their public force and utility in higher education research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queer, post-colonial and Black feminist scholars and activists have long cautioned against the dangerous exclusions and complicities entailed in even the best-intentioned efforts to counter sexual violence. The rhetoric of protecting women from sexual violence is frequently and effectively invoked in order to rehabilitate old colonial projects and justify new ones that persecute sexual dissidents, police gender, sexual and caste transgressions and re-inscribe neoliberal and neo-conservative rationalities across the globe. This article argues that many of the exclusionary, violent and coercive consequences of efforts to protect women from sexual violence are rooted in mischaracterisations or mis-descriptions of the subject of sexual violence, and enabled by particular (mis)orientations towards this subject. Specifically, I suggest that the imagination and representation of the subject of sexual violence is subtended by a politically dangerous and conceptually untenable victim/agent binary. Mediated by rationalities of caste, race, class and religion, women are imagined either as vulnerable victims in need of protection, or as capable (even culpable) agents, but never simultaneously both. The failure to reconcile victimhood and agency within discourses of sexual violence is precisely the condition of possibility for a range of violent, exclusionary and regulatory outcomes. This article tracks the effects of the victim/agent binary in dominant responses to sexual violence, before assembling the foundations from which to rethink victimhood and agency away from their binary orthodoxy, drawing centrally on the radical subjectivity of pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chapter identifies the COVID-19 pandemic as not just a public health crisis but also an information crisis. The authors argue that a deeper understanding of the role of culture in information practices is critical for the future of research and theoretical development around humanity's relationship to information (i.e., why information is or is not created, represented, avoided, sought, retrieved, used, shared, or hidden). This chapter highlights the Black Feminist Information Community (BFIC) framework, especially the voice and information aspect of the model in the context of community justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Black Thought's Mise en Abyme" by Rizvana Bradley explores the concept of Anteaesthetics, challenging traditional notions of black art's political and aesthetic roles. Bradley delves into the relationship between Blackness and the aesthetic regime of modernity, emphasizing the unassimilability of Black aesthesis. Through case studies like Arthur Jafa's film, Bradley examines the intersection of black femininity, flesh, and the body, employing a method she calls "appositional" to deconstruct modernity's inscriptions. The text is a complex and recursive exploration of Black thought, offering a unique perspective on contemporary aesthetic theory. [Extracted from the article]