"Aliveness in the Embers": Building a Black Feminist Eco Lab

Session Submission Type: Skills- and Resource-Sharing Session

Abstract

In 2024, we came together to create The Black Feminist Eco Lab (BFEL)—a dynamic space for scholars, change agents, artists, learners, and practitioners who are invested in Black feminist thought and practice. The lab is both a theoretical and material project, rooted in the desire to cultivate a thriving, inclusive ecosystem that resists extractive paradigms and instead fosters ethical engagement, intellectual rigor, and radical imagination. The BFEL does not merely function as a research collective; it is a living praxis grounded in Black feminisms;deeply historical and insistently forward-looking.
Building and sustaining such a space within a conservative environment presents particular challenges. The BFEL is situated in Salt Lake City, Utah, and currently hosted by the University of Utah. In the 2024 legislative session, HB 261 was ratified, causing a ricochet of effects inhospitable to Black feminist work. The abrupt closure of the Black Cultural Center, Women’s Resource Center, and LGBTQ Center stunned our campus in July 2024. Since, freedom of speech on websites and syllabi has been compromised; our courses have been surveilled for content and enrollment; programming that supports race and gender-identified groups have been restricted; and 30% of the physical site of our primary base–the School for Cultural and Social Transformation–is being reallocated by the University, which means the loss of a student lounge that has become a vital safe space on an increasingly polarized campus. This presentation explores the strategies we have employed to cultivate and maintain this lab in a context that is, in many ways, antithetical to the liberatory politics we uphold. We will discuss the practical and theoretical interventions that have allowed us to create and sustain this work, including: how we navigate institutions, community building, everyday pedagogical and activist strategies, and a politics of deep care. Specifically, we also discuss how approaches to our work have had to remain adaptable to the everchanging rhetoric that has denoted us and our work as somehow both desired and dangerous. We plan to share strategies with the group for how, despite this unpredictably violent climate, we have been able to maintain fiscal viability. With our group of participants we plan to engage in discourse surrounding how our aliveness model might be applied to participants’ scholarly/practitioner contexts. At the core of The BFEL is our Aliveness model, which resists the ways in which dominant structures attempt to prescribe, contain, and discipline Black life. Instead, we foreground an ethics of being that prioritizes freedom, interconnection, and care. The model envisions a dynamic ecosystem that underscores the significance of all living beings (biotic) and the essential resources (abiotic) that sustains us. It describes the ways in which working at creating and curating interconnected relationships within ecosystems of care are crucial for generating change and transforming systems of oppression. In an unethically oriented world, the lab is a site for generating scholarship, best practices, and community-building strategies that embrace the full spectrum of Black experiences—from the phenomenal and extraordinary to the quiet, the mundane, and the unexceptional

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Panelists

• Andrea N Baldwin, University of Utah

• Crystal S Rudds, University of Utah

• Cydney Caradonna

• Vivian B Lee, University of Utah

• River Schumann, University of Utah

Biographical Information

Andrea N. Baldwin
Affiliation: University of Utah
E-mail: Andrea.baldwin@utah.edu

Andrea N. Baldwin is an Associate professor in the Divisions of Gender and Ethnic Studies and the Associate Dean for Research in the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. Dr. Baldwin who is an attorney-at-law and holds a master’s degree in international trade policy and a Ph.D. in gender and development studies, is the founder of the Black Feminist Eco Lab at the University of Utah. She has several publications including her 2021 book monograph A Decolonial Black Feminist Theory of Reading and Shade: Feeling the University; 2019 and 2023 co-edited books in the Standpoints Black feminisms book series with Virginia Tech Publishing; and a 2023 co-edited volume on Global Black feminisms. She is the creator and co-host of Standpoints, a Black feminist podcast produced by Virginia Tech Publishing, and the co-curator of the Caribbean feminist series for Black Women Radicals. Dr. Baldwin was born and raised on the small Caribbean island state of Barbados and considers herself an all-around Caribbean woman who loves everything coconut and soca.

Vivian Bo Kyung Lee
Affiliation: University of Utah
E-mail: Vivian.B.Lee@Utah.edu

Vivian Bo Kyung Lee is a Graduate student in the Department of Education, Culture, and Society at the University of Utah. She is the current Graduate fellow for The Black Feminist Eco Lab. Her work revolves around; Community engagement, collective/collaborative learning, Black and Decolonial feminisms, (student) activism, and student speeches throughout history. Her undergraduate degree is in Communication Studies, focusing on critical cultural studies. Her M.Ed is in Education, Culture, and Society, and is actively pursuing her Ph.D. Vivian is a first-generation Korean American born in Colorado and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. As a Korean-American, her conversations with Black Feminist thought have inspired her work in Education activism as a social historian to constantly push back the narratives restricting the thriving of marginalized populations. Her engagement as a practitioner includes being an academic, middle school educator, resource room coordinator, community-engaged learning coordinator, sister, aunty, lover, and more.

Cydney Y. Caradonna
Affiliation: University of Utah
E-mail: Cydney.caradonna@utah.edu

Cydney Y. Caradonna is a queer Latinx scholar, activist, and poet originally from the California Bay Area. She currently lives in the Salt Lake Valley and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership in Policy at the University of Utah. She has a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and master’s degree in higher education administration and leadership. Her scholarly praxis explores the systems and potential ruptures that inform a de/carceral ethos for higher education. Caradonna’s poetry centers the similar tensions to her academic work and research and experiences along multiple systems of marginalization and how we unsettle those systems by speaking back to them. Caradonna’s interdisciplinary approach to inquiry and praxis in higher education has included grant supported research in intersectional studies, policy discourse analysis, and Decolonial Feminist methodological theory.


Crystal S. Rudds
Affiliation: University of Utah
E-mail: crystal.s.rudds@gmail.com

Crystal Rudds is the current faculty fellow for the Black Feminist Eco-Lab. She is assistant professor of English at the University of Utah where she teaches twentieth century literature and theory, Black feminism, and Afrofuturism. Her research interests include urban ethnography, Black geographies, and visual studies. Rudds served as the assistant editor of the oral history, High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (2013) and is currently working on a book project that explores representations of public housing in film, African American literature, photography, and ethnographic narratives. She received her PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and holds an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University-Bloomington.

River Schumann
Affiliation: University of Utah
E-mail: u1378014@utah.edu

River Schumann is a current Graduate Student in the Department of Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and current Graduate Assistant in the Black Feminist Eco-Lab. Their research interests and work is focused on Black feminist geographies, Trans of Color Critique, and Queer Ecologies. As a self-described Black feminist maroon, River challenges theories of coloniality through paraontological inquiry examining blackness as an embodied performance of anarchic subjectivity. They are interested in seeing how blackness has cast the Black figure living at the end of the world. River holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and has traveled extensively throughout the Far North documenting accounts of blackness in spaces where it “should not” be found.