Check out some of my latest pieces, which include scholarly journals, book chapters, blog posts and more!
Towards a Method of Black Feminist Archival
Bricolage: Memory-keeping within, beneath and beyond the Archive
This essay considers the erasure and visceral laceration of Black women’s herstories from white, masculinized archives, timelines, and cartographies of the past. It simultaneously centers the identity-oriented and historically anchored ways everyday Black women collect, curate, and pass down personal archives for the purpose of intergenerational survival and uplift. In centering the life writings and oral narratives of three Black women in the author’s immediate family, this essay disrupts archival silences around the movements, mobilities, and resistance strategies of everyday Black women; rather, it reveals how Black grandmothers, mothers, and othermothers continue to sustain Black women’s viability and visibility through their work as memory-keepers and family historians. By centering the life herstories of her grandmother, mother, and aunt, the author engages in a process of Black feminist archival bricolage, weaving together fragmented pieces of distinct yet overlapping life narratives that—when put together—tell a more complete and complex story of Black women’s movements, resistances, and archival pedagogies. In doing so, archival fissures are collaboratively challenged in order to reclaim, recover, and recenter the invisible cartographies of everyday Black women.
How Social Media Algorithms Hurt Black Girls
My research, which exposes algorithmic racism as the impetus behind viral police killings, was recently spotlighted by Parents Magazine
After studying the effect that viral images of police killings had on Black girls, Dr. Tiera Tanksley decided to research further. The results were shocking.
Building a "Home-Place" in STEM
Leveraging Race, Resistance, and Cultural Wealth to Foster STEM Counterspaces for Youth of Color
This paper examines the power and potentiality of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) homeplaces as places of refuge, spaces of healing and sides of radical possibility for Students of Color. Qualitative interviews with two Women of Color educators ground this study, and provide insight into the programmatic features, including cultural norms, policies and practices, that fostered feelings of safety, love, healing, and empowerment for Youth of Color in an otherwise toxic and exclusionary STEM field.
My Publications
When Black Death Goes Viral
How Algorithms of Oppression (Re)Produce Racism and Racial Trauma
When George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020, his 9-minute death video was viewed over 1.4 billion times online. Likewise, the live stream of Philando Castile being shot by police accumulated over 2.4 million views in just 24 hours. After Sandra Bland was found dead following a minor traffic violation, bodycam footage of her horrific police encounter garnered hundreds of thousands of views in a few short days.
Race, Education and #BlackLivesMatter
How Online Transformational Resistance Shapes the Experiences of Black Undergraduate Women
Grounded in critical race theory and a burgeoning field of Black feminist technology studies, this article takes a techno-structural approach to under- standing the promise and peril of internet technology to support activism, transformational resistance and counter-storytelling for Black college-age- women. Qualitative interviews with 17 Black undergraduate women reveal multiple benefits of leveraging social media for racial justice, as well as the socioemotional and academic consequences of algorithmic racism. These findings support the need to develop new conceptual frameworks that can foster students’ sociotechnical consciousness, and further equip them with the critical race techno-literacies needed to disrupt anti-Blackness both on and offline.
Towards a Critical Race RPP
How Race, Power and Positionality Inform Research Practice Partnerships
This research article challenges the normative construction of RPPs as an inherently equitable, post-racial and ungendered methodological framework. By utilizing critical race theory broadly, and whiteness as property in particular, we highlight how without explicit consideration for the racialization of research identities, RPPs are incapable of disrupting oppressive power structures that hinder equity and social change. As WOC researchers working on a large National Science Foundation granted study, we witnessed two issues in RPP methodologies: (1) institutional power granted by Academe is negated when whiteness is prioritized and minoritized race/gender identities are involved; and (2) niceness is weaponized as a means of protecting education and research as the property of whites in order to maintain the status quo. By utilizing our counterstories to unpack and interrogate the onto-epistemological and sociopolitical infrastructure of RPPs, we offer implications and best practices for how to foster more transformative and racially-just research partnerships. Specifically, we use CRT to theorize a Critical Race-RPP (CR-RPP) methodology that seeks to decentre whiteness and privilege the voices and needs of People of Color and other marginalized communities within schools and academia.
Texting, Tweeting & Talking Back to Power
How Black Girls Leverage Social Media as a Platform for Civic Engagement
Though they represent a minoritized group in the US, Black teens and young adults play a prevalent role in constructing national discourse on racial justice through their politicized social media engagement. Interestingly, as Black girls' social media activism continues to soar, research examining the civic activities of young people continue to position girls and Youth of Color as being politically disinterested and disenchanted. This study sought to disrupt this deficit notion of Black girl civics by centering the voices and digital experiences of 17 self-identified young Black women and girls from across the US and Canada. While the overarching takeaway from these data is that social media is a ripe platform for political activism for users experiencing intersectional oppression, three prominent sub-themes regarding Black girls' explanations for using social media as a platform for civic engagement: 1) social media provides a sense of safety and visibility for young Black women; 2) social media serves as a space for collective anguish, healing and solidarity; and 3) social media provides a renewed sense of trust in news and current events.
Education, Representation and Resistance
Black Girls in Popular Instagram Memes
In recognizing the pervasive presence of popular media, particularly social media, in the lives of today's youth, I also examine the ways that Black girls resist misrepresentation and represent themselves more powerfully by talking back to popular culture through social media. I then analyze the discourses of Black girls on Instagram and discuss and propose a nuanced critical media pedagogy, or a Black feminist media literacy, which can emerge as a way of thinking about resistance to misrepresentation as Black girls combat multitudinous microaggressions in the media, in schools, in their communities and online. This framework merges Black feminist thought (Collins, 1990), critical race theory (Bell, 1992) and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) to theorize a media literacy framework that can illuminate the pervasive reality of racism and sexism in social media, while simultaneously exhuming their injurious effects on African American girls, both inside and outside of school (Noble, 2012).
Lessons from the borderlands
Learning to leverage multiracial consciousness and multicultural wealth in academe
As a mixed race Woman of Color, I draw upon multiple funds of knowledge to bolster my resilience and survival within the academy. My way of reading the world is grounded in traditions of Seneca Indians, northern Italians and African Americans. I am a descendent of intergenerational border crossers: of those traveling by ship as both passengers and as cargo;of those migrating by foot as both displaced Natives and escaped bondswomen; and of those forced to pass as white and those forced to pass state lines to escape the crippling grip of Jim
Crow racism. Born in a family that lived within, throughout and beyond the boundaries of society, I have devised a multiracial consciousness that informs the way I read, navigate and
survive the PhD. Like the famed writer and theorist Gloria Anzaldua, I too am a border crosser: a racial queer skilled in the art of disrupting and subverting hegemonic notions of race and place. By drawing upon multiple funds of knowledge, I am able to leverage the natural and spiritual capital of my Seneca ancestors, the resistance capital of Negro spirituals sang by my distant relatives; and the familial capital of northern Italians in order to survive and thrive within an academy that was not designed with the marginalized in mind. But how did I learn the art of border crossing? How did I become equipped with the cultural
capital to survive a predominantly white, research intensive institution of higher education? Did I glean it from books and articles? From frequent trips to museums and galleries? Was it learned from prestigious internships and world travel? Unlike a majority of the people that occupy spaces in institutions of higher education, I developed the funds of knowledge necessary for transformative resistance and survival through my intersectional experiences as a low-income, multiracial Black girl growing up in “the hood.”
Building Race-Conscious and Justice- Oriented STEM Spaces
Learning from Women of Color Educators
"What does it take to cultivate safe, empowering and culturally sustaining STEM spaces for Youth of Color from low income backgrounds?
In Fall 2018, I helped lead a multi-year, multi-site NSF study designed to answer this question.
As a Black woman who had once been pushed out of STEM, I was deeply invested in exploring this topic and, even more importantly, was acutely aware of how racial microaggressions, culturally hostile curricula, limited access to diverse mentors, and lack of academically rigorous learning opportunities contributed not only to STEM push out, but to systematic spirit murder of Black and Brown youth. Dr. Bettina Love (2016) defines spirit murder as “the denial of inclusion, protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance because of fixed, yet fluid and moldable, structures of racism” – features that have been continually identified as primary features of the STEM field writ large, and K-12 STEM spaces in particular.
Finding Peace During the Protests
Digital Wellness Tools for Black Girl Activists
The growing use of social media as a platform for social justice activism has illuminated both the promise and the perils of social media for Black teens. On the one hand, teen-led campaigns, like #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName, have shed light on the prevalence of racist violence and police brutality against Black Americans. On the other hand, the hypercirculation of graphic murder content has resulted in significant increases in anxiety and depression among Black teens. The complexity of social media to act as both a vehicle for transformative change offline and a conduit of racially traumatizing content online raises some important questions. Namely, how are Black teens surviving these complicated digital spaces? And are they using social media in ways that support communal coping and digital wellness?
Black Boys are losing their lives, but Black girls..we're losing our minds
Youth Mobilizing Social Media for Healing in the Black Lives Matter Movement
These days, it seems impossible to escape the crushing psychological weight of Black death and dying. Everywhere I turn – my social media accounts, local and international news, attendance at protests – the suffocating grasp of Black death and dying – reinforced and substantiated by anti-Black racism – is always there, waiting to strangle the last breath out of me.
“I cant breathe”
George Floyd’s haunting words echoed in my ears. I stood in my driveway, hands bound by the bags of groceries I had just bought from the market, and felt my chest getting tight. “I can’t breathe,” I mumbled, and felt my groceries – and my body – slip towards the ground.