“You Can’t Pour From An Empty Cup”: Self-Care and Spiritual Activism in Queen Afua’s Sacred Woman

Queen Afua created the Sacred Woman as a text and program that seeks to heal women of common disorders that particularly affect the African American community. This thesis project is a conversation about the self-care methods embedded within the text that moves away from the ideology of the strongblackwoman. I position both theories and methods of self-care by using a womanist theoretical framework, as well as textual analysis and interviews as methods that examine the womanist concept of spiritual activism, which expands what is thought of as radical and liberatory activist actions

Bringing Black Feminist's Thoughts, Self-Definitions, and Creative Agency to Digital Media and Technology Design

Users from marginalized groups are often faced with the challenges that result from a lack of diverse thought in the design and implementation of media and technologies that we engage in our daily lives. It is these artifacts that result in the harm, erasure, and hyper-surveillance of Black and Brown people. We seek to disrupt problematic narratives present in tech and design fields by (re)inserting Black Feminism and leveraging our personal experiences to build on design methods. Though research centered on the importance of women’s experiences and standpoints in tech practice is crucial, feminist scholarship has not always reflected the values and the liberation of women who are not white. This paper uses personal narrative to argue for the value of Black feminist thought and methods in the sub-disciplines of computing, such as digital media, human computer interaction (HCI) and human-centered computing (HCC)

LMC 3451 Race, Gender, and Digital Media Course Syllabus

Taught by Brandy Pettijohn, this course examined how race and gender identity are mediated in digital media. The class explored issues of race, ethnicity, and gender + the politics of technology (technoculture) in digital venues, social media, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and mundane digital phenomena.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/192756/1/Pettijohn, LMC 3451 Syllabus, 2024_Redacted.pdfc4321027-eaa6-44f5-a298-a6880ec181d5Description of Pettijohn, LMC 3451 Syllabus, 2024_Redacted.pdf : Course SyllabusSEL