Decolonizing Anthropology

In this episode, Cite Black Women Podcast host interviews Dr. A. Lynn Bolles about her pathfinding work on Black women and the politics of citation in anthropology. A Lynn Bolles, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita in the Department of Women’s Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Anthropology, African American Studies, Comparative Literature and American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park.  She is the author/co/author of 5 books that focus on women, work and political economy in the English-speaking Caribbean and the Diaspora and over 80 articles that are interdisciplinary and intersectional. Her, “ 2001 “Forging a Black Feminist Tradition in Anthropology,” in Irma McClaurin’s volume, 2013 Transforming Anthropology article, “Telling the Story Straight: Black Feminist Thought in Anthropology,” other critical biographical work on Vera M Green, Irene Diggs, and Katherine Dunham and her forthcoming intellectual biography of Black women anthropologists, “Faceless and Voiceless No More” makes Bolles the leading figure in  the contributions of Black women anthropologists to the field.  In 2013 she urged “ cite Black women “ and that call is being answered

S2E15: A Conversation with A. Lynn Bolles on The History and Labor of Citational Practices

Professor Kamari Clarke reflects on her ethnographic work in Africa, her thinking on the legacies of colonialism in the discipline of Anthropology, and her recent work with the Radical Humanism Initiative.

For the transcription and show-notes of this episode, please visit: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/radical-humanism-and-decolonization-an-interview-with-kamari-maxine-clarke

61. Radical Humanism and Decolonization: An Interview with Kamari Maxine Clarke

In this Martin Luther King Day special podcast, we honor the legacy of Ella baker with a discussion of Black women’s radical activism, citational politics and transnationalism. The conversation begins with a brief introduction on Ella Baker and the visionary leadership of the Black women who surrounded Dr. King. We then move into an interview that host Christen Smith conducted with Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry (Brown University) in November 2018. 

Keisha Khan Perry is a feminist anthropologist and political activist whose research focuses on urban social movements against the violence of forced displacement. She is the author of the prize-winning book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, an ethnographic study of black women’s activism for housing and land rights in the northeastern Brazilian city of Salvador. With an emphasis on the United States, Jamaica, and Brazil, she continues to write on issues of black land ownership and loss and the related gendered racial logics of black dispossession in the African diaspora. She recently served on the Latin American Studies Association delegation to investigate the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

Season 1, Episode 3: “Transnationalism, Anti-Imperialism & Citation with Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry"

In celebration of International Transgender Day of Visibility 2020, CBW Collective member Michaela Machicote talks with trans woman warrior, scholar, activist, artist, and story-teller, Dr. Dora Santana, about experiences embodied in language and flesh. Dr. Santana is an assistant professor of Gender Studies at John Jay College CUNY and holds a PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies by the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been published in the Transgender Studies Quarterly – TSQ – The Issue of Blackness under the title “Transitionings and Returnings: Experiments with the Poetics of Transatlantic Water,” where she emphasizes the healing role of ancestral energies in the African Diaspora as an important embodied knowledge that guides black trans people in their path of resistant and transitioning across imposed limits of gender, geographies and the secular. She also published in TSQ Trans En Las Americas, whose title is "Mais Viva: Reassembling Transness, Blackness, and Feminism." She is currently working on her book, Trans Stellar Knot-works: Afro Diasporic Technologies, Transtopias, and Accessible Futures, where she centers the knowledge production by and on Black trans women in the Black Diaspora through a range of digital and embodied media, especially in Brazil, the U.S., and African countries such as Angola.

S2E4: Experiences Embodied in Language and Flesh: Dr. Dora Santana

CBW Collective member Dr. Whitney Pirtle speaks with Dr. Monica McLemore about her career trajectory, moving from her long-time position as a clinical public health nurse to becoming a prominent researcher on Black maternal health and reproductive justice. They discuss the importance of centering and listening to Black women in reaching health equity, and why this matters especially in the current COVID-19 pandemic crises.

Dr Monica McLemore, a tenured associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department at the University of California, San Francisco, an affiliated scientist with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, and a member of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health.
 
Dr. McLemore retired from clinical practice as a public health and staff nurse after a 28-year clinical nursing career. Her research is grounded in reproductive justice across the reproductive spectrum including abortion, birth, cancer risk, contraception, family planning, and healthy sexuality, pleasure, and consent.

She has over 50 peer reviewed articles, OpEds and commentaries and her research has been cited in places including the Huffington Post, Lavender Health, a National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report. AND three amicus briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States. She is an elected member of the governing council and chair-elect for Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) section of the American Public Health Association. She is recipient of numerous awards and was recently inducted into the American Academy of Nursing in October, 2019.

Whitney Pirtle PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Public Health at the University of California Merced. Her areas of expertise are in race and nation, racial/ethnic health disparities and equity, Black feminist sociology, and mixed methodologies. Pirtle oversees the Sociology of Health and Equity (SHE) Lab at UC Merced and is a Cite Black Women Collective member.

S2E5: Black Women and Health Equity: Spotlight on Black Maternal Health and COVID-19

The Cite Black Women podcast is a periodic program with a simple message: Cite Black Women. We have been producing knowledge since we blessed this earth. We theorize, we innovate, we revolutionize the world. We do not need mediators. We do not need interpreters. It's time to disrupt the canon. It's time to upturn the erasures of history. It's time to give credit where credit is due. This bi-weekly podcast features reflections and conversations about the politics and praxis of acknowledging and centering Black women’s ideas and intellectual contributions inside and outside of the academy through citation. Episodes feature conversations with Black women inside and outside of the academy who are actively engaged in radical citation as praxis, quotes and reflections on Black women's writing, conversations on weathering the storm of citational politics in the academy, decolonizing syllabi and more. For more information about our project follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @citeblackwomen and access our website at citeblackwomencollective.org #CiteBlackWomen

Producer and Host: Christen Smith
Co-producer: Michaela Machicote
Audio Engineer: Lydia Fortuna