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Thursday, Nov. 6
Registration and Breakfast: 9:00-10:00am Opening Remarks: 10:00-10:30am Session 1: 10:30am-12:30pm Epistemic Resistance and Womanist Ways of Knowing "On Epistemic Fatigue, Epistemic Overburden, and Forging Futures of Horizontal Resistance" Calvin Bell III, Northwestern University [Online] "Between Doxa and Episteme: African American Womanist Epistemology as Distinct from Subaltern Standpoint" Sheron Fraser-Burgess, Ball State University Lunch: 12:45-2:00pm Session 2: 2:00-4:00pm Carceral Logics, Embodiment, and Black Feminist Critique "Carceral Blackness: Afro-Palestinian Women, Resistance, and the Layers of Colonial, Gendered, and Racial Struggle" Dalal Bajes, Ibn Haldun University "Racialized Embodiment and Bodily Testimonial Smothering" Spencer Nabors, Georgetown University Keynote #1: 4:30-6:00pm "Truants Congregate in Loopholes: Methods for Surviving the Carceral Futures of Ms. Harriet Jacobs's Freedom" Jasmine Syedullah, Vassar College Abstract: Hiding in plain sight, Harriet Jacobs 1861 narrative retreats from the carceral traps of modern freedom in literal and figurative ways. Both in her narrative and life Jacobs opted to stay fugitive even once free, actively integrating the ability to appear and disappear, a truant praxis of political survival, into the public record of slavery's politic of recognition. Drawing on Black feminist and prison scholarship Syedullah considers with Jacobs, how to steal away from the unending loops of racial and gendered violence to congregate in the loopholes of the law, and what it means to get free in the dark. Reception: 6:00-7:30pm Friday, Nov. 7 Breakfast: 8:00-9:00am Session 3: 9:00-10:00am Black Feminist Research "Beyond Feminist Solidarity? Blackness, Berlin's Refugee Movement and Angela Davis" Karenine Lucas, Freie Universität Berlin [Online] Session 4: 10:15am-12:15pm Lorde, Theology, and The Work of Dismantling "Using and Abusing 'The Master’s Tools'" Caleb Ward, University of Hamburg [Online] "'Why Sit Ye Here and Die': Black Women’s Affective and Epistemic Resistance" Ananda Griffin, University of Connecticut Lunch: 12:30-1:45pm Session 5: 2:00-4:00pm Rewriting the Canon: Black Feminist Interventions "A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex: Race, Gender, and the Question of Power" Chinaza Okonkwo, University of California, San Diego "Schwarze Wende" Melina Morr de Pérez, Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle [Online] Session 6: 4:15-6:15pm Black Canadian Education and the Struggle for Equity "Black Women, Equity, & Education: Sapphires, Mammies & Misogynoir" Myrtle Sodhi, York University [Online] "Educational Experiences of Black Women in Canadian Universities" Sonia Lewis, York University [Online] Dinner: 7:00-8:30pm [Invite Only] Saturday, Nov. 8 Breakfast: 9:00-10:00am Session 7: 10:15-11:15am Archives, Fabulation, and Black Feminist Creativity-Pt. 1 "Hartman’s Art of Being a Failed Witness" Nicole Yokum, St. Olaf's College Lunch Session: 11:45-12:45pm Archives, Fabulation, and Black Feminist Creativity-Pt. 2 "Black Girl in the Room" Brittney Kilgore, University of Georgia [Online] Session 8: 1:00-3:00pm Storytelling, Praxis, and Womanist Survival "Storytelling Us Free: Education and Learning in Non-traditional Spaces for Black Women" Diane Marshall, UNCF (United Negro College Fund) "Truancy as Black Method: On the Need to 'Git in the Woods'" Monique Wimby, Emory University Keynote #2: 3:30-5:00pm "Too Much Theory, Too Little Praxis: Unshackling Black Feminism from the Academy" Olivia Perlow, Northeastern Illinois University Abstract: This talk examines how Black Feminism—once a praxis of resistance against racism, sexism, capitalism, and imperialism, rooted in radical movements for collective liberation—has increasingly been co-opted, deradicalized, and weaponized within academic institutions. Neoliberal logics have transformed Black Feminism into commodified intellectual capital, flattening it into theory divorced from insurgent praXis, stripping it of community and activism, and replacing it with performative gestures of inclusion that ultimately reinforce the very hierarchies they purport to dismantle. Yet, amid this containment, enduring sites of resistance persist. Through acts of refusal and radical re-imagination, scholars, activists, and communities continue to reclaim Black Feminism’s revolutionary spirit and reassert its commitment to collective liberation and transformative praxis. Closing Remarks: 5:00pm 
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"On Epistemic Fatigue, Epistemic Overburden, and Forging Futures of Horizontal Resistance"
Abstract: Protesting is not for the weak, and yet this notion is part of a broader paradox in which protesting can make one weak—both physically and mentally. I propose that this paradox can lead to what I term epistemic fatigue and epistemic overburden amongst socially marginalized communities. Building on José Medina’s (2012, 2023) epistemic framework, I define epistemic fatigue as the cognitive, affective, and physical exhaustion that arises from continually initiating epistemic friction. In contrast, epistemic overburden occurs when marginalized individuals must bridge knowledge gaps, compensate for ignorance, or excavate lost histories. These burdens align with Nora Berenstain’s (2016) epistemic exploitation, Sukaina Hirji’s (2021) oppressive double binds, and Emmalon Davis’s (2016) credibility excess, forcing marginalized folk into endless epistemic labor. Drawing on the work of Audre Lorde (1995) and Toni Morrison (1975), as well as the case of Recy Taylor (1944), I demonstrate how these costs reflect testimonial injustice and the toll of systemic racism. As a counterstrategy, I reclaim epistemic laziness—not as a vice, but as a form of resistance and self-preservation, echoing Tricia Hersey’s call for rest as a resistance mechanism (2022) and Saidiya Hartman (1997) and Orlando Patterson’s (1972, 2018) discussions of enslaved peoples’ acts of subtle defiance. This refusal can help foster horizontal solidarity as a means of redirecting energy inward for collective flourishing. "Between Doxa and Episteme: African American Womanist Epistemology as Distinct from Subaltern Standpoint"
Abstract: This paper explores the knowledge construction paradigm in African American Womanism as part of a broader move in the philosophy field of shifting the geography of reason (Gordon, 2020; Outlaw, 1996). African American Womanism (Hudson-Weems, 1993) gives expression to the gendered labor of racial advancement as a shared task that is particularly the woman’s undertaking qua woman. Generated from within the panoply of Black diasporic consciousness in the United States, its constituency is primarily within the race and secondly outward facing. I argue that its social episteme emanates from the self's racialized construction in the space of reasons. It involves onto- epistemological reasoning of a recursive knowledge system. Aspects are experiential truth claims and settled doxa of generation-tested folk beliefs or ancestral wisdom. The generalizable possibilities for this race-based episteme are explored preliminarily in comparison with standpoint theory in education. "Carceral Blackness: Afro-Palestinian Women, Resistance, and the Layers of Colonial, Gendered, and Racial Struggle" Abstract: This paper interrogates the carceral experiences of Afro-Palestinian women, situating their narratives at the intersection of settler colonialism, racialization, and gendered violence. Drawing on oral histories, interviews, and archival materials, it argues that Afro-Palestinian women embody a layered struggle in which imprisonment, surveillance, and occupation are compounded by racial marginalization as Black Palestinians and patriarchal constraints within Palestinian society. Their lives expose a continuum of carcerality extending beyond prison walls to checkpoints, militarized policing, and everyday surveillance in Jerusalem’s African Quarter, Tulkarm, and Jericho (West Bank). The paper bridges Angana Chatterji’s theorization of militarized carcerality and Judith Butler’s work on vulnerability and grievability to show how Afro-Palestinian women resist erasure by asserting resilience through oral testimony, hunger strikes, cultural preservation, and survival practices. By foregrounding these women’s experiences, the paper extends Palestinian studies, contributes to global Black feminist thought, and advances theoretical understandings of the carceral state as simultaneously racialized, gendered, and colonial. "Racialized Embodiment and Bodily Testimonial Smothering" Abstract: In this paper, I argue that the bodily testimonies of racialized subjects are often smothered due to expectations and strategies of racialized embodiment. Kristie Dotson shows how testimonies can become smothered when a speaker withholds her testimony due to her audience’s inability to show testimonial competence.[1] However, José Medina and Tempest Henning show how bodily testimony can provide marginalized subjects with a way to testify even when their verbal communicative agency has been constrained through silencing mechanisms like testimonial smothering.[2] Bodily testimonies create opportunities for fighting against injustice and building communities of resistance, even without words. While Dotson’s analysis focuses on the smothering of verbal testimonies, bodily testimonies can also become smothered. This paper is staging a dialogue between social epistemology and critical phenomenology in order to examine the embodied dimensions of epistemic injustice. [1] Dotson, Kristie, “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression,” from Social Epistemology, Vol. 28, pp. 115-138, 2014. [2] Medina, José and Tempest Henning, “My Body as a Witness,” from Applied Epistemology, (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 171-190, 2021. "Beyond Feminist Solidarity? Blackness, Berlin's Refugee Movement and Angela Davis" Abstract: Scholarship tracing Angela Davis’s connections to Germany has placed little emphasis on her recent involvements in refugee justice movements there.1 This paper examines the role of Davis’s public appearances and dialogs within Berlin’s Refugee Movement by drawing on archival material, predominantly from the self-organized refugee and migrant led organization International Women* Space, to explore the question: Why and how does Angela Davis remain an important figure for the Refugee Movement in Berlin, Germany, and its feminist leadership? Three oral histories from migrant and refugee activist leaders-- Jennifer Kamau, Sanchita Basu and Napuli Langa-- expand the understanding of feminist solidarity. By extending current research on Black internationalism and the feminist icon, this paper contends with the understudied possibilities of ambivalent activism between Black women activists operating from different contexts. This paper situates their activism as an ongoing process of mobilizing and politicizing Blackness transnationally, to imagine abolitionist being beyond the nationstate. "Using and Abusing 'The Master’s Tools'" Abstract: Audre Lorde’s famous statement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” has become a slogan standing for uncompromising pursuit of social change. At the same time, those with more optimism about the critical potential of inherited tools—academic disciplines, legal reform, political institutions, etc.—dismiss Lorde’s words as mere polemic. In both cases, Lorde’s claim is too often invoked with little attention to her political commitments or actual theory of social change. By grounding the metaphor of the master’s tools within Lorde’s political philosophy of difference, this paper argues that Lorde’s “master’s tools” refer to a particular ideological schema of hierarchical difference that holds relations of domination in place. This deeper theoretical grasp of Lorde’s thought enables activists and scholars of social change to formulate better answers to necessary questions in their work: What makes a tool the master’s? And what does dismantling his house actually demand? "'Why Sit Ye Here and Die': Black Women’s Affective and Epistemic Resistance" Abstract: When affective injustice as epistemic injustice combine, they present a complicated boundary for oppressed people to overcome. As such, I dedicate this paper to ways that Black women manage to affirm their knowledge and feelings. The title of this work comes from an 1832 anti-slavery address by Maria Stewart, a Black woman activist and writer born in Hartford, CT. In lieu of Stewart’s speech, this chapter outlines what it means to resist and refuse to sit here and hermeneutically die. I blend Bettina Judd’s work on the importance of emotions in Black feminist theory and José Medina’s work on hermeneutical resistance to explain ways that Black women in particular resist affective-epistemic injustice. The context in which I analyze this dynamic of resistance comes from the Black women in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls. "A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex: Race, Gender, and the Question of Power" Abstract: This paper critiques Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex by centering Black feminist responses that expose its racial and gendered limitations. While Beauvoir’s text remains foundational in feminist philosophy, Black feminist scholars have argued that it fails to acknowledge Black women’s lived experiences and employs a race/gender analogy that renders Black women invisible. I contend that The Second Sex overlooks the intersecting marginalization of Black women and men, as well as the capacity of white women to exercise racialized power over Black men. This oversight undermines Beauvoir’s universal claims about women and reflects enduring missteps in feminist thought. Section 1 considers critiques of exclusion and contextual defenses of Beauvoir. Section 2 traces Black feminist engagements with the text. Section 3 expands Belle’s arguments on the race/gender analogy to include Black men. Section 4 examines Beauvoir’s inadequate references to Black women. "Schwarze Wende" Abstract: The central focus of my paper, "Schwarze Wende" (Black Reunification), is the German reunification period ('die Wende') from the perspectives of Black and migrant communities. A powerful and largely overlooked public letter written in 1992 by Audre Lorde and Gloria Joseph and addressed to the then Chancellor Helmut Kohl is central to my investigation (Off Our Backs, Vol. 22, No. 10, November 1992, p. 18). In this letter, the two prominent Black feminist thinkers challenge the erasure of Afro-German and migrant experiences in the political discourse surrounding reunification. They question the lack of governmental acknowledgement and support for the struggles faced by Black Germans and other racialised minorities at a time of both celebration and rising nationalist sentiment. Building on this, I will explore the strategic use of privilege in this written intervention. Through a close reading of this letter and related correspondence from the period, my research sheds light on the ways in which Black and migrant intellectuals engaged with Germany's socio-political transformation. I examine how these documents functioned as both political interventions and tools for building coalitions across diasporic communities. The talk will also consider how these voices contributed to a broader critique of German national identity and citizenship in the early 1990s. "Black Women, Equity, & Education: Sapphires, Mammies & Misogynoir" Abstract: This paper examines two highly publicized case studies involving two Black women who were very publicly bullied and humiliated as a result of the equity work they conducted for a Toronto school board. I explore the larger discourse on Black women tropes, labor and misogynoir to further illustrate the ways Black women’s labor experiences continue to position them as care workers, social workers, and domestic laborers for institutions and Canadian society at large. More broadly, the paper examines how the Mammy and Sapphire tropes continue to be operationalized through equity work. This paper names the harm that these tropes produced as misogynoir because of the intersection of the racial and gendered oppression that is experienced. One key feature of this paper is the employment of the storywork analysis that supports examining the way the stories of the equity educators, the auto-ethnomimetic stories come apart and come together to connect to a larger national and historical narrative relating to Black women employment experiences in Canada. "Educational Experiences of Black Women in Canadian Universities" Abstract: Using a qualitative research methodology, this study employed a Black Feminist Thought and a Black Feminist Love theoretical framework to examine the experiences of Black female students in Canadian universities. Data was drawn from a total of 10 self-identified Black female students across Canadian universities at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Using thematic narrative analysis, the data were analyzed and coded to identify commonalities and patterns/themes that emerged from the data. Preliminary findings suggest that Black female experience a myriad of challenges as they pursue both undergraduate and graduate degrees. These include a) feelings of isolation/alienation, b) grappling with verbal and emotional abuse, and c) being overworked and exploited. The study is of significance because there is a scarcity of Canadian literature which explores Black female students’ experiences within university spaces. "Hartman’s Art of Being a Failed Witness" Abstract: Failed witnessing is a consistent theme in Saidiya Hartman's work. In Lose Your Mother, “Venus in Two Acts,” and “Dead Book Remains,” Hartman grapples with the painful paradoxes of her efforts to bear witness to the lives of the enslaved, who, she says, “had disappeared without leaving behind any witnesses” (232). Hartman describes her project as one of trying to “witness what others had refused” (“Dead Book”), but also mysteriously compares her own failure to that of others quite unlike her - such as Philip Quaque, an 18th century Black priest who lived for decades above the dungeon in Cape Coast Castle before so much as mentioning the slaves in his many letters to his employers. In this essay, I interpret Hartman’s method of critical fabulation as a queer Black art of failed witnessing that introduces nuance and complexity to the concepts of witnessing employed by Elizabeth Alexander and Kelly Oliver. "Black Girl in the Room" Abstract: This presentation, "Black Girl in the Room," reflects on the intersections of race, gender, and academic space by centering the lived experience of a Black woman navigating predominantly white institutional contexts. Using personal narrative as methodology, the work explores how Black women scholars carry the dual task of producing knowledge while simultaneously challenging systemic exclusions that attempt to silence them. Grounded in Black feminist thought and womanist theory, this project highlights the resilience, intellectual contributions, and transformative practices of Black women in academia. By engaging the body, voice, and writing as tools of resistance, the presentation speaks to broader questions of belonging, authority, and community. Ultimately, this work invites critical reflection on how institutions can shift toward equity by valuing not just the scholarship of Black women but also the fullness of their presence in academic spaces. "Storytelling Us Free: Education and Learning in Non-traditional Spaces for Black Women" Abstract: This essay explores the power of storytelling as a foundational aspect of womanism and Black feminism, centering the lived experiences, struggles, and resilience of Black women. Drawing from personal narrative and the theoretical framework of womanism, the author incorporates teachings from Audre Lorde, Layli Maparyan, and Alice Walker, to examine how storytelling acts as a form of resistance and self-liberation. Using reflections on childhood, family, and community, my presentation will illustrate how womanist values enable Black women to claim their humanity, foster solidarity, and envision a world shaped by wellness, wholeness, and freedom. Storytelling is an act of courage that empowers both the storyteller and her audience to challenge societal norms, heal, and embrace their authentic selves. "Truancy as Black Method: On the Need to 'Git in the Woods'" Abstract: "Truancy as Black Method: On the Need to 'Git in the Woods'" explores how Black women and femmes have turned to physical, epistemologucal, and reproductive truancy as a method of psychic self-reclamation from the abuse found within the geography of containment. Trunacy, then, does not fully exist along the spectrum of quotidian freedom-making actions, but rather becomes a Black method that combines the cunning, shrewdness, and ethos found in both Black feminism and womanism for the sake of short-term psychological survival, epistemological relief, and connection with Spirit and land. Reading trunacy as a physical, epistemological, and reproductive act, this chapter suggests that truancy, by combining Black feminist and womanist ways of survival, is a uniquely Black way of wrestling with Being a non-Being. |
