AADHum— The African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities at UMD— is pleased to present Black as X: Platforming Experimental Scholarship, our first AADHum Scholars Symposium for the 2020 cohort. In a series of conversations with noted Black Studies scholars, each scholar will offer project demonstrations, discuss their project process, and speculate about future project iterations. Join us in exploring the capaciousness of Black life through experimentation with digital methods.

Schedule

Monday, December 7; 1-2:30pm: Adrienne Hall in convo w/ Kaily Heitz

Tuesday, December 8; 1-2:30pm: Dr. Jasmin A. Young in convo w/ Dr. Akinyele Umoja

Wednesday, December 9; 1-2:30pm: Adrena Ifill in convo w/ Dr. Lopez Matthews

Thursday, December 10; 1-2:30pm: Dr. Amaka Okechukwu in convo w/ Joyce LeeAnn Joseph, MILS

Friday, December 11; 1-2:30pm: Dr. Merle Collins in convo w/ Dr. John Drabinski

Tickets are available for each conversation, and you may choose which ones you'd like to attend.

Adrienne Hall | Cartographies of Black Exodus: Mapping past, present, & possible futures of Black San Francisco

Adrienne Hall is a Ph.D. student in Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is broadly interested in Black geographies and the politics of health and place in Black communities. Hall is a member of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), and she is a co-editor of AEMP’s forthcoming book project, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance. Hall and the AEMP also co-produce an oral history zine and public workshop series entitled (Dis)locations: Black Exodus. Hall’s AADHum project uses critical cartography and arts-based storytelling to reimagine Black Exodus as an interactive zine, comprising oral history interviews, creative cartography, archival research, community power mapping, photo, voice, and videos that center the narratives of Black San Franciscans.

Dr. Jasmin A. Young | Building a Black Power Digital Archive

Jasmin Young is an an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC-Riverside, and was most recently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Studies at UCLA. As a historian, her research interests focus on Black twentieth-century freedom struggles with specialization in the Black Power Movement. Young’s AADHum project derives from her extensive research on Black women in the Black Power Movement and her role as an editor of the Black Power Encyclopedia: From “Black is Beautiful” to Urban Uprisings. It prototypes the first phase of a digital archive of participants in the Black Power Movement from 1955-1985, with an emphasis on using metadata to reveal a multitude of historical interventions. Young is inspired by the possibilities of evolving technologies, new media, and digital platforms to enhance public knowledge of the Black Power Movement.

Adrena Ifill | Building a Better Mousetrap: Speculating Access in Black Digital Archives

Adrena Ifill is an award-winning cultural entrepreneur and producer. As C.E.O. of Ifill/DoubleBack Global Group, a cultural heritage management firm, she has written and directed several historical films and managed digital humanities projects. She holds an M.B.A. from Howard University, and is a graduate of the Institute for Documentary Filmmaking at George Washington University. A recipient of the 2015 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists, Ifill is committed to the work of chronicling and preserving Black history and culture. Her critical #BlackDH project thematizes the challenges independent scholars face in identifying and accessing databases and repositories that hold critical information about Black life, history, and culture, and works toward imagining new ways to improve access to such repositories.

Dr. Amaka Okechukwu | Black Belt Brooklyn: Mapping Community Building and Social Life in the 1970s and ‘80s

Amaka Okechukwu is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at George Mason University. Her research engages social movements, Black communities, and urban politics. She formerly served as the oral historian and associate archivist at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. and as the project coordinator of the Voices of Crown Heights oral history collection and affiliated public engagement at Brooklyn Historical Society. She is the author of the award-winning To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions. Okechukwu’s AADHum project traces Black resistance during the urban crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. She believes that Black Digital Humanities is a promising site to engage broader publics in research on Black communities and Black resistance.

Dr. Merle Collins | Interrogating Silences: Grenada and Louise Langdon Little, the Mother of Malcolm X

Merle Collins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Latin American Studies Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has published prose, poetry and critical essays, and is the producer of a documentary film, Saracca and Nation. Her current research interests include the history of Louise Langdon Norton Little, Grenadian mother of Malcolm X, especially vis-à-vis Caribbean migration and diaspora formations. Collins is inspired by the possibility of using technology to further excavate the archival work that underscores research in Black Studies and efforts to understand the complex stories of Black humanity. Her AADHum project prototypes an interactive meditation on her archival research into the life of Louise Little, parlaying video, audio, and interactive interface to surface new perspectives on this understudied figure in Malcolm X’s life.