Conference schedule

10 am   |   Guided OER with Destiny Hemphill

“Where Does It Hurt: A Guided Meditation for Grief Over Injustice”

This offering is a ten-minute guided meditation to acknowledge and honor the grief that inhabits the listeners’ bodies. It also serves as an invitation to self-affirm their presence and survival. Destiny Hemphill uses Warsan Shire’s “What They Did Yesterday Afternoon” and her poem “mapmaking”as anchor texts. Instructors, students, and organizers may use this meditation while learning about oppression or reckoning with the near aftermath of an oppression-rooted tragedy (i.e. state-sanctioned killings of Black people, mass shootings, executions, colonization-caused climate catastrophes, continued pandemic loss).

11 am   |   Panel 1: Blackness, Technology, and Futurisms

“Methods for Two-Strand Twist, or Theorizing the Afro-Cyborg”

P. Alexander Miles, University of Michigan

Cyborg theories and Afrofuturist theories each offer opportunities for people to make themselves freer and more agentic. In a plait of personal narrative and traditional academic prose, this text explores the synergies latent in Cyborg and Afrofuturist methodologies. I offer an invitation to consider the fugitive literacies that Black children employ as they navigate the digital and real without the presumption of a dualism—and hierarchy—between them. I conclude with reflections on a research agenda that might refute hegemony and instead create opportunities for ways of being that reconstruct society.

“For a Black Cyberfeminist Pedagogy”

Melissa Brown, Santa Clara University

According to Kishonna Gray, three themes constitute Black cyberfeminist thought. First, structural oppression shapes technology and virtual spaces. This theme recognizes the white masculine bias of technology and virtual spaces, calling for the marginalized to "regain control of hegemonic imagery to be able to define themselves" (2017:358) with internet technologies. Second, Black cyberfeminism addresses intersecting oppressions in virtual spaces to promote "a privileging of marginalized perspectives and ways of knowing" to address "the diverse ways that oppression can manifest in the materiality of the body and how this translates into virtual spaces" (Gray 2017:359). Finally, the third theme speaks to how Black digital technology users navigate "the process involved in racializing public space within virtual settings" (Gray 2017:359), leading to distinct forms of marginalization and resistance. In this presentation, I build on Black cyberfeminism to examine the pedagogy of Black women intellectuals that use the internet in innovative ways to illuminate intersecting oppressions, despite how society generally views Black people as technologically inept due to the digital divide framework. I describe how Black feminist scholars use digital technology in their course work and public scholarship in ways that facilitate dialogue across borders about Black feminism with our digital platforms. While previous scholars have proposed cyberfeminist pedagogy that pairs feminist methodological and philosophical approaches with the use of digital technology as an educational tool, these approaches neglect intersectionality as an intellectual paradigm. Further, these approaches do not explicitly center on women or LGBTQ people of color. Black cyberfeminist pedagogy offers a corrective to this erasure, by taking into account the Black women's standpoint and what Patricia Hill Collins calls the outsider within social location. From this unique positionality, Black women intellectuals can introduce a unique perspective to existing academic approaches. I assert that Black cyberfeminist pedagogy upends the whiteness of technology studies and cyberfeminism to envision new ways of understanding regarding race and technology in the twenty-first century. Specifically, I name approaches to cyberfeminist pedagogy that uses Black intellectual thought to promote an asset framing about people of color as users and producers in digital technology.

“Queer Black Southern Worldmaking in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts”

Kristen Reynolds, University of Minnesota 

Black scholars and creatives continue to refine what afrofuturism is, has been, and could be. Indeed, Nnedi Okorafor’s reworking addresses an overrepresentation of the West, instead rooting her africanfuturism firmly in the space, history, and cultures of Africa. Okorafor’s work illustrates how engagement with space shapes afrofutures and should serve as a guidepost for defining afrosouthernfuturism. Therefore, I consider a definition that engages black political death and social life as it is shaped by and in what Jarvis McInnis calls the Global Black South. In particular, this paper explores how formulations of the human inform Black art, technology, and life within this site and how those elements invoke and critique “the future.” I turn to Rivers Solomon’s 2017 novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, to discern how their queer dystopia portrays afrosouthernfuturism given how it locates the South in outer space and temporally situates the future as now. I argue that Solomon’s work presents a queer Black southern technofuture which is daily crafted despite manufactured scarcity, eschews notions of Southern “backwardness,” and challenges us to reevaluate who we identify as the architects of our advancement. With this, I propose an extended definition of afrosouthernfuturism that situates it as a Black queer genre of worldmaking that prioritizes the evolving needs, wants, and pleasures of black folks grappling with the afterlives of slavery in the Global Black South. As such, it unmoors us from the logics grounding anti-black geographies and exposes us to alternative ways and spaces of being.

12 pm   |   Lunch Drop-In Discussion: Online Teaching During COVID-19

Join us for an informal conversation of experiences teaching online, parsing the differences between crisis teaching and sustainable online teaching models, and comparing notes about what has worked well for teaching in digital space. 

1 pm   |   Guided OER with Charlie Amáyá Scott

“In My Dreams: A Sensory Experience”

The history of Indigenous Peoples within the US Empire is a tale of both violence and survivance, which can be difficult to engage and work through for many. This OER uses the process of a body scan, a mindfulness technique, to really get folks comfortable with their body and notice what is happening internally while using poetry as a medium to talk about the history of the Diné, or the Navajo, my community. Yet, this violence is not only unique to many Indigenous communities, but is something that many other marginalized communities have something in common as we all survive and navigate systems of exploitation and oppression in a world that denies us love and freedom. This OER ends with a reminder of how beautiful, brilliant and powerful we are and that our stories of resistance need to be shared and celebrated. 

1:30 pm   |   Round Table 1: Creating Open Access Materials with Intention

This summer, Pedagogy Fellows at the Center for Black, Brown and Queer Studies created audio shorts that blend guided meditation, storytelling, oral history, and podcast for use in virtual classrooms. In a time of online and hybrid learning, this gives students a mental break from both screens and their environments. Students, like their parents, teachers, and professors, are eager for ways to engage that provide both stimulation and escape. Students experiencing multiple traumas and crises are unable to effectively take in and retain information. This type of educational material accounts for that ongoing trauma, ensuring students have the opportunity to be grounded in their bodies and mindful of their mental state. 

This roundtable explores their process of designing, researching, and creating intentional open educational resources (OER) in the current educational climate. Fellows will discuss the challenges and creative highs they’ve experienced and speculate on the future possibilities of OER in and out of the academy.

3pm   |   Guided OER with Tatiana Bryant

“‘I Would Have Just Lived’: Surviving Japanese Internment During WWII (Part 1)”

“‘I Would Have Just Lived’: Surviving Japanese Internment During WWII” (Part 1) is the first of a two part series that features the oral history testimony of Mitsue Salador and was written, researched, and recorded by Tatiana Bryant, with the support of the Pedagogy Lab at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Listeners should note in advance that this audio Open Educational Resource includes themes of grief, xenophobia, racism, and war.

In the early 1940s, Japanese American teenager Mitsue Salador was directed to go to college for nursing because Japanese women weren’t hired as teachers at white schools. Dismayed, she entered college in Portland, OR to study nursing briefly, before she was forced into an urban detention center for people of Japanese heritage after Pearl Harbor. Mitsue organized a loophole escape from the detention center by applying to a college in the Midwest where she would be deemed as less of a potential threat away from active war theaters. Isolated from her family, she continued her education while her parents and youngest sibling survived an internment camp and older siblings navigated college and active military service. In part 1, Mitsue Salador of Long Island, NY via Hood River, OR, talks about her lived experience as a college student and daughter of Japanese immigrants before the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

This audio OER features excerpts from Mitsue Salador’s 2019 oral history and integrates contemporary and historical soundscapes reminiscent of the Portland, OR street where the Assembly Center (formerly a livestock exhibition center) was located. It invites listeners (students) to reflect on their own experiences, specifically their college and career aspirations, obstacles they may have encountered in order to attend, and continuing college during a pandemic. It asks listeners to consider how they would respond if they were told they couldn’t aspire to a certain career because of their ethnicity. Finally, it encourages listeners to make empathetic connections to a woman whose college experience, family, and life was suddenly interrupted in order to survive detainment shaped by a white supremacy-driven global event.

October 9th

6 pm   |   Opening comments by Dr. Caitlin Gunn

October 10th

October 11th

10 am   |   Guided OER with Ángel Gonzalez

“Vamos a Chismear: Queer Chisme with QTPOC Community College Students”

Queer Chisme is a cultural intuitive way of knowing rooted in survival by womxn, queer, trans, and those at the margins to survive cisheteropatriarchal structures (Gonzalez, 2021; Gutierrez, 2017; Trujillo, 2020). The chisme exposes power imbalances and cultivates community and safety with those who we can build kinship with to resist and exist in collective spaces. I use chisme as a way to share care, to mobilize towards advocacy, and expose inequities in higher education (Gonzalez, 2021). I invite you to listen and use this queer chisme sensory audio experience to reflect, move towards healing, and learn more about the power within you.

11 am   |   Round Table 2: Building an Educational Laboratory

This panel features the senior leadership of the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies in conversation about cultivating scholarly communities outside of (and adjacent to) academia. Dreaming up spaces where scholars of color and queer scholars can spend time relating to one another and not whiteness, the BBQ+ team imagines a post-interdisciplinarity that resists discipline, reinvents public scholarship, and disrupts academic competitiveness that damages our communities. 

12 pm   |   Lunch Drop-In Discussion: The Syllabus as Argument

Join us in this informal setting to discuss the syllabus as a genre which must make an argument—and in so doing, illuminate the reasons for reading and engaging with the syllabus for students. 

1 pm   |   Guided OER with David Diaz

“Call and Response: The Sounds of Collective Resistance”

This open-access educational resource discusses the practice of call and response: its history, its significance in Black diasporic music, and its potential for facilitating collective resistance. The audio begins with a description of call and response and a brief history of enslavement to explain how call and response has developed across various regions in the Black diaspora. It then demonstrates the power and potential of call and response as a tool of collective resistance to racial violence by exploring an audio clip from a Black Lives Matter rally in Washington, DC, in the summer of 2020. This close reading of a short clip explores the soundscape of social movements and the ways that call and response can bring people together, amplify a political message, and inspire action.

1:30 pm   |   Panel 2: Researching and Producing OER

During this panel, Pedagogy Fellows at the Center for Black, Brown and Queer Studies will present on the research, writing, and creative processes that enabled the creation of short audio open educational resources (OER) created for classroom use. 

“Other Worlds: An Intro to Afrofuturism”

Destiny Hemphill

This offering will be an approximately ten-minute audio introduction to Afro-futurism. Approachable and digestible, this audio short guides students to engage with Afro-futurism not only as an analytic tool but as a conceptual approach to community organizing and creative work. At the end, students will be invited into two different writing prompts. The short concludes with approximately 1 minute of instrumental music, no voice-over.

“A Decolonial Memoir: Desires and Frustrations”

Charlie Amáyá Scott

Oftentimes, when we engage with the framework of decolonization, it comes from a very specific theoretical strand within the academy and does not include or interconnect with the lives of Indigenous Peoples, especially those who have survived and continue to survive genocide. This OER engages with the idea of decolonization through a short narrative that highlights a conversation from a grandchild and their grandmother. The story does not adhere to a linear format of time, yet goes back and forth between the past and present, an almost cyclical reflection as one plans and figures out their future. The work of decolonization requires an entire epistemological, ontological, axiological, and methodological shift internally and externally. This is simply the beginning of a lifetime commitment.

“‘I Would Have Just Lived’: Surviving Japanese Internment During WWII (Part 2)”

Tatiana Bryant 

“‘I Would Have Just Lived’: Surviving Japanese Internment During WWII (Part 2)” is the second of a two part series that features the oral history testimony of Mitsue Salador and was written, researched, and recorded by Tatiana Bryant, with the support of the Pedagogy Lab at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Listeners should note in advance that this audio Open Educational Resource includes themes of grief, xenophobia, racism, and war.

In the early 1940s, Japanese American teenager Mitsue Salador was directed to go to college for nursing because Japanese women weren’t hired as teachers at white schools. Dismayed, she entered college in Portland, OR to study nursing briefly, before she was forced into an urban detention center for people of Japanese heritage after Pearl Harbor. Mitsue organized a loophole escape from the detention center by applying to a college in the Midwest where she would be deemed as less of a potential threat away from active war theaters. Isolated from her family, she continued her education while her parents and youngest sibling survived an internment camp and older siblings navigated college and active military service. 

In part 2, Mitsue Salador of Long Island, NY via Hood River, OR, talks about her lived experience as a college student and daughter of Japanese immigrants forced to relocate to a detention center after the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

“Queerness, Race, and Reproduction: Exploring the Politics of Childcare through Lee Edelman, José Muñoz, and Christina Sharpe”

David Diaz

This open-access education resource explores the political, social, and theoretical issues surrounding children, childcare, and reproduction. It begins with a personal reflection on how my queer friends and I would speculate about the possibility of having children as undergraduate students. I observe that our queerness made these questions so salient to us as we recognized the unique challenges that we had as queer children. I then explore a tension within queer theory between scholars Lee Edelman, who characerizes childrearing as a necessarily heteronormative endeavor, and José Muñoz, who critiques Edelman’s argument for ignoring the fact that society does not value Black and brown children in the same way as it does white children. Despite Muñoz’s influential critique, I caution against assuming that critiques of the imperative to reproduce necessarily exclude racial analysis by drawing on the work of Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe, who calls attention to the ways that racist institutions have forced Black people to reproduce in certain contexts. By putting these scholars in conversation, the audio reflects on the wide-reaching practical and theoretical consequences of reproductive politics.

“Positively in Love”

Ángel Gonzales

There continues to be a lack of health sex education that is queer and trans inclusive. Many of us are not exposed to our resources until later in life yet must learn everything regarding heterosexual sex practices and resources. This feels extremely homophobic and transphobic given the health induced epidemic we as a community experienced 40 years ago during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Now, in the midst of another global pandemic, remanence of survival’s guilt and potential recollections of the past and feelings of “we’ve been here before,” we must educate and provide adequate resources around health education. In this short I engage in a reflective platíca where I revisit the first date with my partner where I learn about his status of being HIV+. The aim is to understand how we can move towards destigmatizing sex in our communities that are impacted by HIV and provide current resources, practices, and ultimately share how I am positively in love.

2:45 pm   |   Panel 3: Intellectual Labor and Theories of Resistance 

“Becoming 'International' Teaching Assistants: The 'Plasticity' of Hidden Work in Challenging the Precarities of a Global Pandemic in the Canadian University”

Vedanth Govi, York University 

This paper explores the ‘plasticity’ of the hidden work that international teaching assistants perform within the Canadian University during the COVID-19 pandemic. By borrowing from critical race scholar Zakiyyah Jackson’s conception of “plasticity” as a praxis that seeks to “define the essence of a black(ened) thing as infinitely mutable,” this paper investigates how three specific kinds of hidden work make international teaching assistants (TAs) the fleshy beings within the Canadian public university who are infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter, such that the category of the international student is produced as sub/super/human at once. Through four semi-structured testimonials, I examine three specific kinds of hidden work in this paper, (1) creating a sense of positive self-worth amidst disempowering practices; (2) engaging in advocacy vis-à-vis employers, sometimes through launching official claims through the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE); and (3) developing strategies to uphold the “chronopolitics” of the Canadian University and its decision making during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately this paper suggests that recognizing the hidden work that international TAs have performed during the global pandemic as having an indefatigably mutable quality will help us comprehend how the public university in Canada should not be understood as an alternative to geopolitics but as one of its crucial elements – and one that can also be found in the project of a critical geopolitics.

“Notes on Black Interiority and The Read”

Kidiocus Carroll, University of Minnesota 

The Black body has been a site of technological exploitation since the slave ship. Still, Black people have always found ways to survive. In The Black Interior, Elizabeth Alexander asks, “What in our culture speaks, sustains, and survives, post-nationalism, post-racial romance, into the unwritten black future we must imagine?” Alexander argues that the answer is “the black interior”—a complex imaginary that troubles the “fantasy discourses” that have come to characterize Black life. In this paper, I take Alexander as a point of departure to examine the popular Black queer podcast, The Read. I argue that Black people and a resistant Black pedagogical approach can exceed the exploitation that occurs in digital spaces through a praxis that centers Black queer interior life and cultural work as a means of imagining Black futurity.

4 pm   |   Keynote Lecture: Dr. Nicole Truesdell

“Rage to Heal: Reflections on the Human as a Cyborg”

Link to video

The human is a cyborg. In order to subjugate and control, whiteness had to limit the definition and understanding of who and what the human is. In that narrowing, whiteness also confined our understanding of what technologies are and how we can deploy them for our own liberation in the present. I argue if we remove the lens of whiteness in our understanding of the human, and therefore the cyborg, we open ourselves up to being able to access and then use the technologies already in our possession that were purposefully severed via the colonial project. The main technology removed was our anger -feeling it, sitting with it, communicating and learning with it, and then unleashing it to speak truths and help us enact bold strategies for our futurity.  

In this interactive keynote, anger and I grapple with the following questions: What would happen if we gave our anger a seat at the table and let it speak fully, freely, and unapologetically? What would occur if our rage was let out, focused, and then deployed to do the work it knows needs to be done because we are afraid to do it? What if we understood our emotions, especially our rage and anger, to be the technologies at our disposal for our liberation?