African American Studies Commons^™

The Mini Syllabus: Locating And Engaging With Black Women In Popular Culture, Katrina Marie Overby

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Real #Hotgirl Sh*T: Practical Application Of Intersectional Re-Presentation Instruction, Jessica F. Love

Feminist Pedagogy

This critical commentary outlines how the Real #HotGirl Sh*T: Megan Thee Stallion & Mediated Hip Hop, Black Feminist and Communication Pedagogy promotes active learning via popular culture and digital media, and it provides a practical model for employing intersectionality in classroom settings. Previous critical media pedagogy exploring minority media re-presentation primarily focused on the effects of master narratives produced by traditional media. This syllabus's incorporation of social and digital media helps students understand how collective minority groups use and interact with media as a political tool to challenge re-presentational regimes. More importantly, this syllabus employs real-world examples of popular culture …

A Hip Hop Dialogic: Exploring Hip Hop Feminism In The College Classroom, Makini Beck, Nickesia Gordon

Feminist Pedagogy

In this paper, we explore the use of Hip Hop feminist pedagogy in an undergraduate classroom. We discuss the ways an in-class deliberation activity can: 1) engage students in ethical argumentation and critical reasoning on Black and Latina women’s representations in Hip Hop music and culture; 2) invoke discussions about the sexual and racial politics inherent in Hip Hop, including the objectification, hyper-visualization and marginalization of Black and Latina women; and 3) prompt students to think about Black and Latina women’s resistance to dominant male discourses and the ways women participation in the music and culture can be identified as …

#Hotgirlsemestersyllabus, Katrina Marie Overby, Gheni Platenburg, Niya Pickett Miller

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Savage, Classy, Bougie And Ratchet Feminist Pedagogy, Katrina Marie Overby, Gheni Platenburg

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Crying In The Classroom: Teaching (Through A Lack Of) Racial Empathy, Brittney Miles

Feminist Pedagogy

Intense emotions in classrooms are often interpreted unfavorably because of how bodies can disrupt a space that centers the mind. However, bodies can also reflect students’ and educators’ emotional relationships with course material. Through an elucidative reflection on the pedagogical power of racialized emotions, this critical commentary considers the transgressive possibilities of racial empathy as a Black feminist epistemology. As a Black woman graduate student instructor, tensions emerge in classrooms around what it may mean when Black students and I are crying, and white students are not. Intense emotions, or the lack thereof, complicate the politics of power, responsibility, emotional …

Utopian Promises, Dystopic Realities: Teaching Bell Hooks “No Love In The Wild”, Naimah H. Ford

Feminist Pedagogy

This original teaching activity discusses bell hooks’ film review of Beasts of The Southern Wild and explains how it can be used to encourage students to recognize how popular culture reproduces and reinforces disturbing paradigms. This original teaching activity, based on hooks’ review “No Love in The Wild,” encourages students to be informed while navigating visual images in popular culture. This activity also explains how hooks’ film review and the film can be used to empower students with strategies to analyze film and other visual images that are seemingly progressive but support the strictures and structures that reinforce patriarchy, racism, …

Loving Blackness: A Sense Experience, Ricardo J. Millhouse

Feminist Pedagogy

The late bell hooks framed feminist pedagogies as a set of practices and systems that provide a description of feminism, a feminist learning environment, and ways to cultivate a community that is ready for feminist instruction. Using intersectionality, hooks (1992) discussed “loving blackness” as a representational and destabilizing practice to de-center whiteness. hooks (1992, 20) writes, “loving blackness as a political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life.” I propose a black feminist praxis teaching tool, “a sense experience,” …

Black Feminist Pedagogy In White Southern Spaces, Frances B. Henderson

Feminist Pedagogy

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks situates the classroom as “the most radical space of opportunity in academia” (hooks 1994,), as it is within this space that we might challenge and transcend ways of knowing centered in patriarchy, sexism and racism. But what happens when the classroom is located in spaces loyal to the historical frameworks that buttress white supremacist heteropatriarchy? This article examines my twelve years of experience in teaching undergraduate courses in political science at a small liberal arts college in the mid-South. At its center are critical reflections on attempts to formulate and employ a black feminist …

Documentary Review: Belly Of The Beast, Clare Daniel

Feminist Pedagogy

Belly of the Beast (Cohn, 2020) chronicles the legal and political battle surrounding forced and coerced sterilization of women incarcerated in the Central California Women’s Facility during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Uncovering a contemporary example of eugenics and the institutional logics that protect and justify those practices, this film provides a crucial tool for feminist educators teaching about reproductive injustice, racism, gender-based oppression, and the power of feminist activism. In what follows, I briefly summarize the film and offer a discussion of how it might be used as a tool of feminist pedagogy by 1) providing an opportunity …

A Transgressive Pedagogy Of Tenderness In Hybrid Education, April M. Jones, Stephanie Anne Shelton

Feminist Pedagogy

In the midst of the dual/dueling pandemics COVID-19 and anti-Black racism, the instructors considered how best to have the course requirements for a qualitative research course meet students' personal and academic needs, while managing students' and their own exhaustion and fear. Through hybrid Zoom-based focus groups, instructors and students applied a "pedagogy of tenderness" that centered care and humanity as essential to classroom interactions and learning.

The Ill-Treatment Of Their Countrywoman: Liberated African Women, Violence, And Power In Tortola, 1807–1834, Arianna Browne

Master's Theses

In 1807, Parliament passed an Act to abolish the slave trade, leading to the Royal Navy’s campaign of policing international waters and seizing ships suspected of illegal trading. As the Royal Navy captured slave ships as prizes of war and condemned enslaved Africans to Vice-Admiralty courts, formerly enslaved Africans became “captured negroes” or “liberated Africans,” making the subjects in the British colonies. This work, which takes a microhistorical approach to investigate the everyday experiences of liberated Africans in Tortola during the early nineteenth century, focuses on the violent conditions of liberated African women, demonstrating that abolition consisted of violent contradictions …

“Beychella:” Beyoncé’S Homecoming To A Futuristic Queer Utopian, Jolie V. Brownell

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance and 2019 Homecoming film set the stage for a radical Black queer reimagining. Yet, how can Beyoncé—who is straight—be located within a queer critique? In this paper, I argue that through a radical and political expansion of queer, the creative deployment of dis/identification, and the unapologetic expression of the erotic, Beyoncé performs an embodiment of queer of color critique. These creative gestures within “Beychella” invite viewers into a queer futuristic utopian and provide new creative modes to politically inhabit, resist, and reimagine interlocking systems of oppression.

Keywords: Beyoncé, queer, dis/identification, erotic, QoCC, …

Strive And Struggle: Documenting The Civil Rights Movement At Cal Poly, 1967-1975, Josh Harmon, Laura Sorvetti, Catherine Trujillo

Creative Works

“Strive and Struggle: Documenting the Civil Rights Movement at Cal Poly, 1967-1975,” pays tribute to the students, administration, and national civil rights leaders that brought about lasting changes to Cal Poly.

In collaboration with University Archives, Kennedy Library staff, Graphic Design student assistants, and History Department graduate students, the exhibition is presented through the pages of the campus newspaper, the Mustang Daily, and explores campus reactions, struggles and triumphs during the Civil Rights years, as well as the efforts to establish Ethnic Studies courses, recruit Black faculty, and combat racial prejudice on campus.

Though the peak of the Civil Rights …

Where We Stand: 1975-2011, Laura Sorvetti, Catherine Trujillo, Josh Harmon

Creative Works

Where We Stand is an extension of the 2009 exhibit Strive & Struggle: Documenting the Civil Rights Movement at Cal Poly, 1967 – 1975 and similarly draws from Mustang Daily articles, student club documents, and oral accounts to construct a brief history of African American advocacy on the Cal Poly campus from the Civil Rights Movement to the present day.

The exhibit documents the roles that student and faculty organizations played in building awareness of issues of diversity and identity on campus. Assessing their efforts reveals both what has changed since 1975 and what remains to be addressed on the …

The Features Of The Voice Of African American Tradition: An Analysis Of African American Rhetoric For The Influence Of The Call Response Technique, Laura Venezia

Communication Studies

This project explicates the nature of the rhetorical strategies, especially the call response, used by various African American artists and orators (Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and Public Enemy). The techniques include the interplay of repetition and heightening emotion provided especially through 1. using the “call response” directly, 2. announcing jeremiad warnings and rallying cries, and 3. using potent images to arouse emotions—the objective correlative.

In Living Color, Chappelle's Show, And Bamboozled: Decoding Representations Of Blackness, Genevieve Odette Owsowitz

Communication Studies

This paper investigates depictions of African-Americans in popular American television and film. It examines the social context and historical background of three mediated texts in an effort to decode the political commentary present within comedic images.