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Charlotte as Teaching Canvas: Exploring & Celebrating African Diasporas through Digital Storytelling

Thu, March 17, 3:00 to 4:15pm, Omni Charlotte Hotel, Salon A

Abstract

My presentation will showcase my digital storytelling project that uses the city of Charlotte as a teaching canvas to explore the local African Diasporic landscape and to reframe the commonly told single story of Blackness that is often perpetuated in textbooks, pedagogies, and by dominant discourses. I collected diverse first-person narratives of Afro-descendants living in the city to celebrate the diverse cultural and socio-linguistic contributions of these communities in my hometown. The overall goals of this working digital storytelling project are threefold: 1) to recognize and center glocal Black voices, experiences, and contributions that are commonly marginalized; 2) to document less explored transnational perspectives that challenge dominant discourses that tend to essentialize Blackness; 3) to explore and celebrate African diasporic (popular) cultures, histories, literatures, languages, religions, social movements, and struggles with inequitable systems that disenfranchise these communities. My presentation will chronicle this ethnographic digital storytelling project that features Charlotte residents of African descent from various socio-economic, cultural and linguistic Diasporas to explore their lived experiences(realities) of navigating languages, identities, representation, resistance, and race in transnational spaces. It will explore contemporary constructions of Blackness and perceptions towards these Diasporic movements of people, cultural practices, languages, aesthetics, and popular culture across borders by using local knowledge and experiences. It utilized the city of Charlotte as a pedagogical canvas to contextualize these transnational experiences (lived realities) as well as popular cultural movements resulting in the collection of seven digital stories. Thus, this digital storytelling project put my African descendant participants at the center of their experiences and values them as authors and educators of their own lived realities. This project is part of a forthcoming series of digital stories that will use non-traditional (indigenous community cultural knowledge) epistemological and ontological approaches and methodologies to conduct research and transform pedagogy by collecting diverse testimonies in an effort to counter the idea of a single Essentialized dominant narrative of Blackness.

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