Project
Black Diasporic Visions: (De)Constructing Modes of Black Power

Project Team
Javiela Evangelista, Project Director, New York City College of Technology, CUNY
Carla Shedd, Project Director, Georgetown University
Wendy Barrales, Contributor, New York University

Students: Josh Adler, Rosa Angela, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brittany Brathwaite, J. Michell Brito, O.D. Enobabor, Ruben Mina, Janelle Poe, Kayla Reece, Ashleigh Washington, and Crystal Welch-Scott

Project URL
https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/black-diasporic-visions-de-constructing modes-of-power

Project Reviewer
Maia L. Butler, University of North Carolina Wilmington

Project Overview

Javiela Evangelista, Carla Shedd, and Wendy Barrales

The Black Diasporic Visions: (De)Constructing Modes of Power digital project is a collaborative publication created by course instructors and Futures Initiative 2022 Faculty Fellows Javiela Evangelista and Carla Shedd, their students, and digital curator and Manifold Fellow Wendy Barrales. In consideration of pathways of liberation formed by African people and people of African descent inside and outside of oppressive structures of power, as well as the development of alternative visions and spaces, our collective contributions and hopes reached far beyond what the course could hold, which led to this open-access digital project. 

Our project interrogates the values and colonial histories of design, from meditations, to sonic explorations, with the goals of engaging with public audience(s), showcasing the collective’s work, and recreating a space for learning and activation with the greater community. We chose Manifold as the digital repository for the project, given its role as the free digital publishing platform for the CUNY community. The project highlights our course work and readings for commentary, contributions, remixing, and replication. It also features student projects, including “Keywords” (some of our own making and others an expansion of existing terms), “Our Conjurings” (or abstracts for op-eds written and submitted to a range of outlets towards greater access and amplification), and “Resources” that inspired us, from sound to exhibitions and writings.

The range of constructions and visions within the project, despite, within, and at the intersections of institutions and systems impacting education, the prison industrial complex, food justice, public planning, preservation, legal personhood, and climate change, to name a few, aim to address omissions and misrepresentations in academia, archives, and society writ large. As Black Diasporic Visions centralizes historically and globally informed liberatory possibilities that challenge divides between theory and practice in service to Black Futures, it is our hope that the knowledge that grows out of the project will inform and continue to be informed by urgent interventions and creations.

Project Review

Maia L. Butler

Black Diasporic Visions is a collaborative publication born out of a course in African Diasporic, Postcolonial, and Digital Public Humanities. An open educational resource (OER), this publication is meant to be shared and referenced widely, and the authors invite user contributions and “remixing.” Further, the Manifold digital repository hosting the site, a free collaborative and open-source platform, is extremely user friendly and facilitates citation through an annotation tool.1 

The two project directors, Javiela Evangelista and Carla Shedd, were CUNY Futures Initiative Faculty Fellows.2 Wendy Barrales, a Manifold Fellow, supported the project through digital curation as the faculty and students designed the multimedia materials hosted on the platform. The student contributors are scholar-activists, artists, practicing social workers and educators, and are struggling alongside and serving multiply-marginalized folks in their communities. Their art and work addresses injustice in the prison and immigrant industrial complexes, in education and child welfare, and interrogates how race, class, gender, ability, and citizenship inform the myriad ways people are harmed by these institutions.

The project collaborative explores and resists the ways power structures impact knowledge creation and dissemination, shape mis/representations of Black diasporic subjects and thought, and promote narrow conceptions of what canons and archives can hold and omit. The ways these forces overdetermine knowledge-making in academia and society writ informs their work beyond traditional notions of curation. The invitation for user engagement to disrupt the false dichotomy between theory and practice and imagine and craft new pathways through exigent societal issues has immense potential for teaching, scholarship, and art. 

As such, Black Diasporic Visions’ homepage offers an overview of the project’s inception, terms of collective use with an ethic of deep attention and care, and the course description inspiring the digital project. This precedes co-created linked pages: the resource guide, where each student reflects on their learning intentions and growth; abstracts of student conjurings (op-editorials) on contemporary issues; and keywords, both existing theoretical terms and also novel concepts offered by the creators, all thoroughly referenced. A final resources page offers a list of additional audio, visual, and textual productions for further engagement. Right-clicking to open these pages in new tabs is encouraged, which facilitates a non-linear exploration of the materials, further encouraging remixed approaches to response and re-sharing. Beyond these links, additional visual and sonic resources and 19 other linked multimedia resources include the course reading schedule; videos of authors providing interviews, readings from their work, or overviews of their art; paintings; tours of art exhibits; news clips; and lectures. Each features a “Comment” box whereby users contributing their own content become co-creators. Guests are invited to engage and share from the project site and to use the hashtag #BlackDiasporicVisions for social media and sharing, to track course adoptions, and to follow the project’s continuous evolution. 

This digital project is an amazing model of emerging scholar mentoring and training that centers the knowledge and experiences students bring into the classroom to develop community-oriented praxis.