In my Social Justice ePortfolio (SJ-eP) I analyze existing diversity and inclusion responses to Black Women Artists, Cultural Workers, Organizers and their communities at Build Your Archive located in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Greater Metro Atlanta as part of CIS 668 (Social Justice and Inclusion Advocacy) course during fall 2023. On this page, I provide my interdisciplinary perspectives and theoretical framework.
Interdisciplinary Lens
Portrait of Chandler Stephens for "To Be A Witness" Documentation Project, Digital Photograph by Sierra King, 2021
"To Be A Witness" is the main documentation project of Build Your Archive. It is a nomadic portrait journey across the women who I, Sierra King, have collided, befriended, advised, listened, cried, danced, laughed, with me in this lifetime and beyond. It is an exploration and interrogation of our choices as women in how we create, cultivate and sustain community.
As the work has evolved it, I have come to realize that it is working within the Black Feminist Theory, Black Studies and Black Archival Praxis.
Black Feminist Theory as a compass and pathfinder. Through the books we read, documents we analyze and experiences we glean from they all have the common denominator of Black Feminism. One could also argue that Black Queer Feminism has defined a lot of the work. At the core, I am interested in replicating conscious-raising groups such as “The Sisterhood” but also designing new models and process that support Black Women Artist, Cultural Workers and their communities.
Black Studies becomes the historical marker and search for knowledge beyond the Western Civilization. According to Wikipedia it is “A specific aim and objective of this interdisciplinary field of study is to help students broaden their knowledge of the worldwide human experience by presenting an aspect of that experience—the Black Experience—which has traditionally been neglected or distorted by educational institutions” While I have always been deliberate in speaking to the Black Experience as a Black Memory Workers, I want to be more specific and historically accurate when distributing information.
Black Archival Praxis / Practice is the mutual understanding that the experience of Black life and the ways and which Black People choose to document and preserve their lives has expanded what and how the field of Archiving traditionally defines "Archives". Whereas historically documentation of the Black community has been used as a tool of observation and surveillance
As a Black Women and Black Memory workers we "bring specific skills to the proverbial kitchen table and remind us of the richness before" (Ewing 2022). It is one that combines both experience and collective memory to the archives and projects that we are involved in that is able to provide radical care and empathy in ways that is natural to the communities that we serve. (Caswell and Cifor, 2017)
Within the process of humanization, the relationship between the archivist and the artist is deepened to help the artist see future value in not only their narrative but the cultural work that they produce during that particular time in history.
Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria 81 (Spring 2016), 23.
K.T. Ewing (2022) Fugitive Archives, The Black Scholar, 52:4, 43-52, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2111653
Ince JI (2023) Between the witness and the observer: what ethnography can learn from James Baldwin. Front. Sociol. 8:1158520. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.1158520
Jordan, J. (1995). Civil Wars. In Google Books. Simon and Schuster. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Civil_Wars/v8ql0L_HMLYC?hl=en&gbpv=1
Reyes, V. (2020). Ethnographic toolkit: Strategic positionality and researchers’ visible and invisible tools in field research. Ethnography, 21(2), 220-240. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138118805121
Theoretical / Conceptual Lens: Transformation
In the essay “Women Artists: The Creative Process”, bell hooks reminds us that “We have yet to create a culture so utterly transformed by feminist practice that it would be common sense that the nurturance of brilliance or the certain creation of a sustained body of work fundamentally requires such undisturbed hours.” (Hooks, 1995)
Transformation as a conceptual lens is the political and praxis radicalization process that a Black Woman Artists, Cultural Worker and Organizer goes through when presented with information while reading, studying frequently, being in community and participating in conscious-raising groups. All while sustaining an art practice that is on a continued cycle of aligning with her political beliefs that leads to liberation.
By utilizing the text Black Women Authors, as an archivist, I am able to recommend primary sources in the forms of letters, correspondence, photographs and direct quotations that could not only provide insight but also lead to additional questions.
The examples above are how I used the tool of annotation to highlight significant parts of the texts as a why to help them see the information in ways they had not before. This is currently being done through Build Your Archive’s newsletter and social media channels.
Hooks, B. (1995). Art On My Mind: Visual Politics. New Press.
