Womanist Pedagogy: A Digital Archive Learning Experience
Presentation | Monday, May 18, 2021 | 11:00am – 12:30pm EST
Philadelphia-based Womanist Working Collective (WWC) has formed community resources for the past six years through media literacy, cooperative economics, and wellness workshops for Black women, femmes, and AFAB gender non-conforming people. The WWC Archival Fellows have created a digital archive on Omeka, including an oral history collection to increase access to this community resource. Rooted in womanism, the WWC digital archive enables practitioners from various disciplines to engage communities in critical literacy and grassroots archiving. Through the act of appraising, preserving, and collecting materials, the fellows developed a deeper understanding of womanism as a liberation practice against white supremacy, misogyny, and capitalist exploitation. The goal of this talk is to introduce a womanist form of pedagogy, which enables the archive user to come to their own understanding of anti-oppression through the experiences of WWC members and co-organizers.
Presenter: Ashby Haywood & Kailee Faber
Ashby Haywood is a community oral historian, musician, and librarian. S/he holds a B.A. from Bennington College and currently works at the Highlander Education and Research Center in East Tennessee. Ashby’s archival work centers on critical literacy, grassworks archiving, and Afrofuturism.
Kailee Faber is an archivist based in Brooklyn, NY. She specializes in working with collections that deal with Black, queer, and other community based archives. She has worked at The Free Library of Philadelphia, The Institute of Jazz Studies, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Womanist Working Collective, Visual AIDS, and artist studios.