Black Queer Feminist Visioning at the End of the Academy

Coordinators: Moya Bailey and SA Smythe

As Black Queer Feminists in the academy, we often say, “We [are] not about this life,”. In this network gathering, we will imagine the life we are about. This gathering allows us to retrofit the relationships required to create the world of our post-apocalyptic dreams. We will  dismantle the US academy within our lifetimes. We will reverse engineer the types of research projects, ethical engagements, and collective care practices that will serve us at the end of the academic industrial complex. We will envision our lives in the academy here and now, knowing  that this looming inevitability will come to pass. Participants will leave with crowdsourced “fugitive home-training principles”, an accountability structure for our radical and liberatory scholarship, a plan for how to be “in” the academy but not “of” it, and new ways of feeling at home in the master’s house.In the ten years since the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition planted the seeds for an approach to technology that restores relationships and heals neighborhoods, local residents across the US have built technology based on principles of justice and resilience.