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"Let me tell you what you should do
You got to act, to get the facts
living in the world, ​that's kind of wack
Move your groove thang
To keep your soul intact
So whatever you do
Hey don't funk with my groove...
You betta bring YOUR SELF!"
~THEESatisfaction
​#MeToo.  #TimesUp.  #UnapologeticallyBrown.  #WithDACA. #ConDACAlogré.  #HereToStay. #BlackLivesMatter.  #BlackTransLivesMatter. #BlackGirlMagic.  #ICantBreathe.  #SayHerName.  #NoDAPL.  #IStandWithAhmed.  #CrimingWhileWhite.  #OscarsSoWhite.   And (in the words of Erykah Badu) “it goes on and on and on.” You could trace any one of these hashtags and uncover a range of social protests and everyday folk doing all that they can to disrupt the oppressions surrounding their lived realities.  These hashtags represent more than just social media trends or a fleeting moment.  These are social movements that frame the time and space in which we do and live our research. 
 
This class is a mixture of many things.  As your teacher, I am styling this class to be part writing workshop, part graduate seminar, part listening session, part qualitative inquiry… and I will need YOU to style it alllll the way DOPE.

​We will look closely at qualitative research--- especially as it relates to the education of brown and black youth--- and the critical methods, politics, and dispositions that speak back to structured racism and power today.  We will set the historical urgency and social context of our work in the Movement for Black Lives and its BlackFeministQueer frameworks.  We will begin our semester interrogating knowledge, race, and the academy with scholars like Sylvia Wynter, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Robin Kelley in the hopes that we can question and deepen our own methodologies from the place of that interrogation.  We will look at a canon of black and brown qualitative researchers, from Zora Neale Hurston to John Langston Gwaltney to critical race theorists, who have questioned the role of university research in maintaining racist hierarchies and exploiting marginalized communities. In sum, we will treat the Movement for Black Lives as a fundamental, methodological challenge for how we, as activists/ teachers/ scholars live and understand the work that we do/want to do. ​
First coined as “Black Girls Are Magic” by Cashawn Thompson, the slogan #BlackGirlMagic stormed the scene less than a year after Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created #BlackLivesMatter. In this course, we will treat #BlackGirlMagic as a very specific temporal relationship to Black feminisms, digital Blackness, Black freedom movements, and 21st century (re)iterations of white supremacist and imperialist narratives.  We will challenge and move beyond the simplistic frames that have positioned (and thereby dismissed) #BlackGirlMagic (BGM) as merely a kind of beauty and visibility politics that must ultimately fail for only imaging “magical interventions” against racialized/sexualized violence.  ​​​​Instead, we will closely examine contemporary political and aesthetic movements in Black feminisms that have made BGM possible/legible:
  • Activism and policy campaigns that challenge Black girls’ criminalization via schooling and policing regimes, like the notable work of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s #SayHerName and Monique Morris’s Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
  • The increased attention to Hip Hop feminism and its ongoing challenges to traditionalist notions of Black feminisms and third wave feminisms
  • Black girlhood studies and its new archival research of the past and present in relation to migration, justice, and work
  • Research on Black girl literacies and Black feminist pedagogies as new categories of analysis for the meaning of reading, writing, and performance in and out of schools
  • Current critiques of Black women scholars rooted in Black feminist and intersectional thought against the de-racializing/de-Black-womanizing impulses of scholarly work that rejects intersectionality for assemblage theory
  • Black feminist digital vernaculars--- seen in projects like Kimberly Bryant’s “Black Girls Code,” Yaba Blay’s “Professional Black Girl” series, or Pauline Alexis Gumbs’s “Eternal Summer”--- that innovates on the most available technologies in order to push alternative sites of knowledge, cultural rhetorics, authoring, and textual production
We will treat our class as a new kind of maker-space where we will strategically position what Alexander Weheliye calls “racializing assemblages” alongside Black feminism’s “disavowed” yet stand-alone sustained reinvigoration of African American cultural theory as we follow “black cultural archives that typify different manifestations of enfleshment” (118).  Since the “sexualized ungendering of the Black subject” (Weheliye 108) has played a pivotal role in the making of modernity, we will reject any notion that our keen focus on Black women is unrelatable or irrelevant to any western geography and ask new questions of whitestream classrooms, literacies, digital theories, and rhetorical histories.
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