The Centering Black Childhoods speakers’ series, organized by our department with support from the Mellon Foundation, uplifts scholarship, art, and activism with Black children. We value the contributions Black children make to how we know and theorize our everyday worlds. We center Black children’s ways of knowing, playing, dreaming, and loving, in order to create new, more just futures in the present. This Speakers’ Series involves translating and lifting Black children’s complex realities and ways of knowing to wider consciousness, while simultaneously working with youth and communities to sculpt critical strategies for freedom and liberation. We engage in this Speakers’ Series hand-in-hand with activists, artists, practitioners and young people who work to alleviate contexts that harm Black children while envisioning and creating caring community. We envision each of these gatherings as building community and launching ongoing working groups in racial justice scholarship and praxis.
Past Black Childhoods Speakers Series events
October 2024 Centering Black Childhoods: Collecting and Archiving Visions of Black Childhoods This event featured a panel of scholars and artists engaged in studying, storytelling and archiving Black girls’ cultures. Attendees heard from Destiny Crockett, inaugural Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Childhood Studies and Racial Justice, Vashti DuBois, an artist and the Founder and Director of Philadelphia’s The Colored Girls Museum, Samantha White, our PhD alum in Childhood Studies and Assistant Professor of Sports Studies at Manhattanville University, and Nydia Blas, photographer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College. The panel was moderated by Childhood Studies doctoral candidate LaTiana Ridgell. With this panel, we sought to understand how some Black women scholars and artists approach the representation of Black girls and girlhood in the visual arts and archive while also offering opportunities for scholars, artists, community members, and students to connect, collaborate, and share how they are centering Black children and childhoods in their work.
May 2024 Meet the The Matumbila’s and Join in a Conversation with the Creator Zul Manzi A conversation with Zul Manzi the creator of the animated comedy hit series The Matumbila’s. This comedy series is about a Tanzanian middle class family living in the United States and satirizes clashes between the immigrated parents and their first-generation American children in the broader context of immigration, diaspora, African culture and American culture.
October 2023 Engaging Voices and Collaborative Conversations A panel of researchers, activists, and young people engaged in participatory, community-based storytelling projects centering youth perspectives, including the social justice media team of POPPYN (Presenting Our Perspectives on Philly Youth News). Community networking and dinner immediately following the panel.
April 2023 – Dr. Nazera Sadiq Wright, Associate Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. This event also included talks from author Mariama J. Lockington, and educator Elaysel Germán.
March 2022– Scholars, Activists, and Communities in Conversation,” our inaugural Black Childhoods Speakers Series event took place virtually on Wednesday, March 9 from 6-7:30 p.m. The event brought together scholars, graduate students, undergraduates and community members from Rutgers-Camden and the wider Camden community. Participants also included attendants from across the U.S. and abroad (including India and the UK among other locations).