“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
- Toni Morrison
Teaching
My classrooms are designed as spaces for students to connect course texts to the materials that make up their everyday lives. Through an innovative engagement with media and movement, I invite students to think critically about the ‘extra-curricular’ objects and phenomena that hold their attention. By creating space in both lectures and seminars to pull in material from popular culture and social media, I support students in developing themselves as informed cultural readers and active audiences in the mediascapes that surround them.
Selected Courses
Clementine Hunter, Women Picking Cotton in the Field (1970)
Race, Gender and the Performance of Labor
This course focuses on the development of critical thinking, reading, and writing skills through an engagement with Black feminist perspectives on labor and the analysis of contemporary media texts. The overarching objective of this course is two pronged: (1) to establish strong and sustainable reading and writing practices, (2) to foster an intellectual curiosity that can be applied to our everyday lives. With the methodologies of Black women writers as our guide, we will establish a dynamic base of expository writing techniques such as description, close reading, speculation, “critical fabulation,” and analysis.
blk+wimmin+cyborgs: Black femininity & Digital Performance
Singer/Songwriter Tanerelle performing at “Mama Saturn’s Galactica” Virtual Concert Jan 29, 2020
How does digital technology impact the way we see black women?
How does digital technology impact the ways black women see themselves?
This course approaches these questions through critical engagements with literary and popular representations of the black woman as a cyborg, an entity who is both human and machine. While Donna Haraway has argued that the cyborg is a figure without an origin story, this course sets out to trouble that notion by paying close attention to the ways ‘feminist cyborg theory’ intersects with the concerns of Black Studies. Pulling from a range of media texts from the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler to the unapologetically vulgar videos of Lil Kim, this course utilizes black feminist theory and creative production to explore the relationship between the black female body and technology.
Ula Taylor Theory Map by Ra Malika Imhotep + miyuki baker for The Church of Black feminist Thought (2019)
Embodied Citation: The Practice of Black feminist Study
This political education workshop utilizes the methods of communal and collaborative study I have developed with miyuki baker through our Spiritual-Political Education Project, The Church of Black feminist Thought. Through a convergence of embodied practice (mindfulness, mantras, breathwork, movement prompts) deep engagement with the work of Black feminists writers, scholars and artists we create pleasurable pathways to holistic integration of Black feminist thought.