Social Sciences – Page 35 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Social Sciences

Black Feminist Approaches to Black Popular Culture Pedagogy – Expected Results/Conclusions

Black popular culture and Black feminisms in social media have become generative pedagogical sites in previous years. With the rise of celebrities such as Beyoncé and Lizzo, and the explosion of social media as a primary means of creating cultural discourses, students are increasingly interested in how gender, race, sexuality, class, and other vectors of identity shape their entertainment experiences. Yet, few teachers feel comfortable effectively teaching Black popular culture using an intersectional lens. This project will construct a guidebook for teaching Black popular culture using Black feminist pedagogies and best practices from seasoned educators, to provide educators with a comprehensive framework and concrete strategies for teaching Black popular culture across disciplines. This project uses a variety of sources from interviews to books to educational studies in order to look at what it means to teach popular culture through the lens of Black feminism. Our research team has studied Black popular culture and Black feminism in an academic setting in order to better understand how to ask questions for our interviews we conducted for the project. The questions this guidebook will answer are: 1) What is Black feminism? 2) What methods can I use for teaching that fall under the framework of Black feminism? 3) How can I ensure these methods of teaching allow students to get the most out of their experience, academically and personally? The goal for this guidebook is to be used as a resource for educators across the country. Since Black feminism and Black popular culture have not been taught widely among classrooms, we hope this guidebook will start making these methods and ideas accessible.

Human Rights and Indigenous Rights in Africa

Indigenous Africa began as a way to spread awareness of evictions and land grabbing against the Maasai people in Tanzania. The project serves to be a center of information for various groups of people. The project now encompasses many different countries and ethnic groups. Today, we cover all regions of Africa and have nearly 80 cases covering a diverse array of both peoples and issues happening across the continent. We break down cases into seven different categories: Conservation, Agribusiness, Infrastructure, Refugee Crises, Mining, Farmer Conflicts and Urban Expansion. Every case is listed under a file. It provides an overview of each case’s name, where it is occurring, who it is assigned to, when it was last updated, when it was last posted to our social media accounts, and the relevant bit.ly link we use when promoting it. Our shared Google Drive account contains a folder for every country we have researched. This is where we store all relevant articles, case drafts, blog posts, research papers, photos, etc. In the past two decades, indigenous peoples in Africa have experienced a sharp increase in violations of their human rights and intensified efforts to appropriate their land and water resources. Indigenous peoples include pastoralists (herders), agro-pastoralists (who mix herding with farming), and hunter-gatherers (who forage and hunt small game). These communities depend heavily on land and water resources that they have accessed for generations, hence the loss of these resources threatens their livelihoods and existence. Violations in indigenous communities do not receive enough media coverage of the injustices that impact them, and this lack of attention continues to hinder support for indigenous peoples to maintain their traditional lifestyle.

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