“True resistance begins with people confronting pain . . . and wanting to do something to change it.”
“There can be no love without justice . . . abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. It is a testimony to the failure of loving practice that abuse is happening in the first place.”
“The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.”
bell hooks (née Gloria Jean Watkins)
Team Leader:
Tabatha L. Jones Jolivet, PhD (tjonesjolivet@apu.edu)
Design:
Theoretical, Epistemological, and Qualitative Approaches
The Womanist and Black Feminist Collective (The Collective) is a generative and transformative space that unapologetically centers the radical imaginings of abolition—an intersectional and revolutionary Womanist and Black Feminist (W & BF) idea and praxis that is rooted in Black radical tradition and powered by everyday people through Black freedom struggle. Through a rigorous ethic of love, study, and struggle and animated by the spiritual strivings and linked fates of African continent and African diaspora peoples, The Collective is dedicated to upending death-dealing ideas, institutions, logics, and systems—namely, disrupting nightmares and nightmarish conditions of anti-Black oppression in all forms and realizing the freedom dreams and demands of Black flourishing. We foreground the preciousness of all Black lives, afterlives, and futures, and recognize as knowledge sharers and generators the multitudes of Womanist and Black Feminist artists, cultural workers, intellectuals (organic and traditional), healers, organizers, practitioners, and scholars that shape our lives, work, and contributions.
By engaging W & BF modalities that fuel imagination, rest, wakefulness, creativity, life, healing, labor, world ending, and world building across space, time, and generations, we tend to the W & BF gardens of our ancestors, contemporaries, descendants, communities, and selves. We appeal to the vastness and richness of W & BF aesthetics, axiologies, epistemologies, ethics, God talk, hermeneutics, methodologies, movement building, ontologies, philosophies, praxis, resistance, spirituality, and wisdom. In doing so, we strive to build the world we deserve to live in—a Beloved community of kinship, mutuality, and care. Moreover, we center collectivist models of scholarship.
The Collective’s scope is sufficiently broad enough to nourish a variety of agendas. Current Collective Scholars interrogate a broad range of topics in their dissertations (e.g., Black women’s college experiences; Black womxn’s activism, organizing, and movement leadership; creativity and liberatory praxis; decolonizing Black student experiences at HSIs; how technology perpetuates anti-Black racism and misogynoir; intersectional and antiracist leadership; progressive Black masculinities; Womanist, emancipatory, and decolonial approaches in pedagogy and higher education; sexual violence and transformative justice, etc.).
Students Needed:
Open
Preferred Skills:
The team is suitable for students who wish to ground their own lives, creativity, labor, and scholarship in Womanist and Black Feminist thought and praxis. Joining The Collective is an invitation to practice self-reflexivity and group-centered leadership.
Meeting and Travel Expectations:
The team will meet during January and July intensives, as well as on a monthly basis utilizing the Zoom platform. There are no travel requirements.