You feel watched, you pull over to avert and the eyes pull over with you.
You know that this happens. You know how this happens and why.

Scholar and author Bettina Judd, Ph.D., shared these lines from her video poem, “On or About July 10, 2015 for Sandra Bland,” during the second event of the Fordham series Black Feminist Worldmaking.

The black and white video, also shot by Judd, shows the view from the back of a car driving through a neighborhood. Over a woman’s vocalizing, Judd recites the poem about the day Sandra Bland was arrested and her death a few days later in a Texas jail cell. The poem accompanies her essay Sapphire as Praxis: Toward a Methodology of Anger.

“I share that poem to start our discussion today [to show how]  interdisciplinary creative production is an important Black feminist practice for me,” said Judd, assistant professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Washington, and interdisciplinary writer, artist, and performer. 

Throughout her presentation, Judd shared works by influential Black women activists and artists with accompanying images of notes from her archives.

“I was ushered into being by a Black woman writer, by other Black women writers, including Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison in my teenage years—and I have been changed ever since,” she said.

She also shared another poem of hers written in an experimental format called a Sapphire Paradox, which she attributes to the poet Tyehimba Jess from his book Olio. 

“You can read it from any point in the poem that has punctuation and move on to the next line,” she said, and proceeded to recite the poem four different ways. 

Among the poem’s lines are “When I said that I was angry, I meant I was angry” and “I name the peace in my heart girl, she that is lost.”

“That Lorde essay, Eye to Eye: Black Women Hatred and Anger, that helped me think through the ideas of hatred and anger in that poem,” said Judd.

Understanding the World Through Black Feminism

Scholars like Judd, who “think about Black feminism in relation to artistic practices and creative practices like poetry,” are the type of speakers Sasha Panaram, Ph.D., said she sought out when she created the Black Feminist Worldmaking series, which began last fall.

An assistant professor of English, Panaram wanted to introduce her students to Black women authors for her course Texts & Contexts: Treasure(d) Maps, Black Women, and Southern Literature.

“I don’t want students to think of the theory that we read as divorced from the world we live in,” she said. “How can I bring people that we’re reading together in class so that they can meet with the students, so that the students can actually ask them questions directly?”

The series, sponsored by the Arts and Sciences Deans’ Faculty Challenge Grant, the English Department, and the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies program, was designed to bring scholars and activists who work on Black feminism to Fordham.

Panaram’s hope for the series is for students to be inspired to seek out new and unexpected job prospects for the future. 

“I think so much of what we do as professors and people who work with young people in the university is training them not only for the jobs that exist, but the jobs that they’re going to create for themselves,” she said. 

She also hopes that students use the framework of Black feminism and the works of Black feminists to make sense of our world.

“Black feminism is a mode of thought, but also a way of living that can help us understand the world we live in today, and in fact, make it better,” said Panaram.

Managing Anger

During the Q&A after Judd’s presentation, Michele Prettyman, Ph.D., assistant professor in the department of communication and media studies at Fordham, asked Judd whether she found it necessary to manage anger.

“Anger has the possibility to burn things down—that’s what makes it useful as well as very dangerous,” said Judd, who is also the author of Patient, which addresses the history of medical experimentation on Black women. “I think for me that is, of course, an ongoing process.” 

She relayed a story about how her mother would purposely read a book about religious and scientific racism because it made her angry, and how she herself was no longer angry at the same book because her mother had digested the anger for her. 

Judd noted that her mother read the book at the library and never brought it home, which meant that she could process her anger in a controlled, safe space. 

“I can’t say that I have the answers for all the ways that one must engage with anger for one’s own self-care,” she said. “But I think I like this idea of using it as a practice and practice space … If you can practice it in a safe space, it can perhaps be less harmful.”

The next and final event of the Black Feminist Worldmaking Series will take place on March 8, with Salamishah Tillet, Ph.D., of Rutgers University.

Gregory Donovan, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and co-founder of the Fordham Digital Scholarship Consortium, organized the conference with department chair Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D.

Instead of paying a fee, conference-goers were asked to send donations to Goddard Riverside at Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center, which offers services to the Amsterdam Houses across the street from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

Digital mapping is a process that merges data with maps to create a virtual online image that can be static or interactive. Donovan said focusing on social justice issues through the lens of digital mapping allowed for a cross-disciplinary approach that wouldn’t ordinarily be found at a typical geography conference. Professors came from a variety of disciplines, including history, art history, urban planning, Latinx studies, psychology, social work, and education.

“Spatial media have politics, these are not neutral things,” said Donovan, who teaches a course of the same name as the conference for the Masters in Public Media.  “We need to look at how our subjects are using digital mapping in their own lives and not just use this technology to study them from afar, like a scientist with a clipboard.”

In panel titled “Mapping the Local: A Focus on New York,” Jennifer Pipitone, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at the College of Mount St. Vincent, and Svetlana Jović, Ph.D., assistant professor of developmental psychology at SUNY Old Westbury, presented research that essentially handed the digital “clipboard” over to the Bronx Community College students they were teaching —and studying. At the time, the two were writing fellows at the college.

In an effort to map what “community” meant to the students, the researchers used geo-locations of photos taken by the participants “in order to illustrate and make sense of their experience of belonging in the city,” they wrote in the abstract. The maps revealed that students restricted their movements to above Central Park, “delineating participants’ lived boundary of race and class.” The method is referred to as “participatory action research.”

Throughout the conference, dozens of examples were given on how mapping technology can be used to heighten consciousness and problem solve. Adam Arenson, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Manhattan College, also on the Focus on New York panel, talked about how he worked with his students to help map slave burial sites in the Bronx, many of which sit unmarked on New York City parkland.

“These are all ways to memorialize the injustices of the past, to map them in the landscape and to be aware of them,” he said. “Though the information is incomplete, and we must do what we can to fill out the map, make the connections, and demonstrate how the injustices of slavery still shape New York City today.”

In her keynote address later that day, Sarah Elwood, Ph.D., professor and chair of geography at the University of Washington, took a theoretical look at how mapping with communities through participatory methods helps “unprivilege the map,” thereby making it less of a colonial process.

As one of the early theoretical thinkers in the field of geographic information systems, known as GIS, she said she is still learning how to infuse her work with “critical race thought” that has surged in academia over the past five years. After the lecture, she recalled a moment at a mapping justice conference in Baltimore when she noticed the diversity of the participants.

“I looked around the room and I realized that it was a different room than one that I had ever been in, in this critical mapping world,” she said. “It was full of activists and young scholars and people of color, queer folks, thinking and theorizing in ways that were not part of my first 20 years in this field.”

She called the moment an “epiphany.” She said while she continues to incorporate Marxist critique that allows her “to get at some structural processes of inequality” in mapping, her work is now heavily informed by black feminism, queer theory, and Latinx studies.

“Once you’ve had an epiphany like that, it’s like, ‘Well, duh, obvious!’ but yet, you’re also embarrassed that it’s taken so long for this epiphany to happen,” she said. “I always think, in those moments, ‘Thank God we have our whole life to become ourselves.’”