Study Group: Recovering Black Feminist Legacies in the Athens of America
Led by fellow Seeda School learner Cierra Peters
Join us for this upcoming Seeda School workshop: Recovering Black Feminist Legacies in the Athens of America led by Cierra Peters.
During my creative biotechnology residency at Ginkgo Bioworks in 2021, I spent an entire month talking with biotechnologists, touring labs, and swimming in all the commonalities and breaks inside of synthetic biology overlapping with black feminist ecologies. It was a wildly generative time for my practice, the Seeda Origin Story and the world of Cykofa was born inside of that residency. The emergent eroticism of my intellectual curiosity being stimulated in completely new ways. What happens when you put a SynBio scientist and a black feminist in a room? You find out they’re doing similar work using different tools and leveraging completely different levers of power. But the material is the same — life — both practitioners are shaping change, shaping relation, shaping worlds. This residency shaped an open question that has been seeding many projects inside my practice: What is the conversation synthetic biology and black feminism must have? Octavia Butler provided the initial seed data. Walking the streets of Boston drunk off all the possibility waiting to be unearthed when black feminist theory overlaps with the web of synthetic biology — I started to ask myself where are all the black folks?
Outside of the internet and it’s wild web of decentralized possibility, biotechnology seems like the other recent technology most related to the aesthetic of blackness — funky, with fermentation at its core, generativity as an active ingredient, and shaping life through cultures, being black is doing biotechnology and to do biotechnology you have to engage the audacity shared by blackness. The audacity to shape life, shape change, shape futures. High off this air of audacity — disoriented, I still thought, all this blackness and no black folks?
It wasn’t until Cierra Peters invited us into her on-going research project, “Recovering Black Feminist Legacies in the Athens of America”, that I realized audacious black feminist biotechnologists have been shaping change and (in)forming life on the streets of Boston for decades. Cierra cites Pauli Murray, Rita Hester, Angela Davis, Barbara Ransby, Hortense J. Spillers, Coretta Scott King and many other black feminists as connected cultural workers informing the social science of Boston. Other Black feminists connected to the legacy of shaping change in Boston is the Combahee River Collective which mobilized after the serial murders of Black women in Boston, Melnea Cass who organized on behalf of perhaps the most vulnerable workers in Boston: domestic employees, and Ellen Jackson who founded Operation Exodus, a program that paved the way for the desegregation of Boston's public schools. In an American city with seemingly the highest concentration of biotechnology projects, is it a coincidence that these SynBio scientists are working inside the legacy of black feminist world builders?
Join us for this upcoming Seeda School workshop: Recovering Black Feminist Legacies in the Athens of America led by Cierra Peters. Where she will share her research and invite us into a few general questions such as:
Does an exploration of Boston’s black feminist legacies provide a map or a blueprint of collective governance and doing government differently?
Does Black feminism necessarily render statecraft, borders and governance impossible?
What is the black feminist legacy in your neighborhood?
We will also share a worksheet inside the study group to orient around. Through the world-building worksheet, we will speculate using the questions above as seeds. We will imagine how a block, small town, or city might collectively steward itself using the black feminist legacies of Boston and your own neighborhood as prompts. Through recovering black feminist legacies in the “Athens of America” we might remember we’ve been shaping change and growing possibility all along.
Community Ask
Please forward this email and share the study group flyer below or registration page with anyone you think might be interested in exploring the black feminist legacy of Boston and it’s potential clues for how we might world build elsewhere and otherwise. Join Cierra Peters, the Seeda School learners, and I next Tuesday as she invites our collective imagination inside her research project.
With care,
Ayana
