"Archiving the Self" Registration is Open!
A Workshop for the Personal, Family, or Community Memory Worker
Hello friends! I am thrilled to launch registration for a workshop that I’ve been, well, workshopping for some time now. I have included a gift for you all because I am so appreciative in advance for your reading and sharing of this announcement.
In this workshop we’ll think about Black feminist archival praxis (theory + practice = praxis) as engaging what I conceptualize as love as method. There is considerable devotion involved in documenting, gathering, curating, and organizing an archive. It is “no trifling matter” to regard the self, one’s work, a literary figure, a community, seriously and highly enough to undertake the labor of love that is archival preservation. In these times, when life saving research that can be categorized as “woke” is being thwarted, dismantled, and disappeared from public access, memory work in the hands of the people (as creators, as circulators, as learners) is a crucial practice.
Archives hold blueprints for survival; it is an act of love to leave these blueprints for descendants and it is an act of love to embrace the “sankofa practice” of returning to retrieve lessons from ancestors, to “read until [we] understand,” and to perform this labor with a spirit open to divine messages that the material of the archive does not hold (because of the violence of the practices of “the” historical record), or cannot hold, or holds in ways illegible to the uninitiated (to protect sacred knowledge and closed practices). This conjuring work is a Black spiritual technology with a long history and it facilitates the archival literacies required to access the knowledge requisite for first imagining, and then constructing, next worlds.
Click here to access your FREE “Love as Method” zine.
Where will our workshop meet?
We will conduct meetings on zoom. We will prioritize the safety of Black, Indigenous, Queer, Immigrant, Disabled and otherwise marginalized folk. All who commit to that priority are welcome to join our collective.
When will we meet?
We will meet on the second Saturday of the month, from 12:00 pm to 2:00pm EST, for five consecutive months. The ample time between meetings will allow for deep engagement with our readings and field notes logs, and will also allow for the incorporation of their lessons into our respective practices around our archival projects.
December 13, 2025: Devotion to/as Practice
January 10th, 2026: Love as Method: Witnessing, Regard, and Documentation
February 14th, 2026: Sacred Archives: Wake Work, Conjure, and Radical Repair
March 14th, 2026: “The Things You Keep, Keep You”: Material Objects as Archives of Ancestral Knowledge
April 11th, 2026: Afrofuturism and the Archive: Blueprints to a Next World
How will we work together?
I’ll provide advance readings that will serve as groundings for each of our discussions. We will discuss which concepts, practices, and approaches speak to us from the readings by Black feminist scholars and practitioners.
Together, we will discuss ways to operationalize information in the readings toward our respective archival projects. In other words, how can we make the Black feminist ideas meet and shape our work styles and plans for our developing archives?
What tools will we use to do our cultural work?
I will provide:
An Archiving the Self workshop syllabus
A workshop reader containing readings and resources
A weekly communication grounded in our readings to encourage inspiration and reflection
A field notes log for use throughout the workshop to document our developing praxes
A lab notes worksheet for use during our workshop meetings to move us from theory to practice for our continuous archival work
Together, we will co-create:
A Black Feminist Memory Worker’s Glossary as we discuss the concepts, practices, and approaches that speak to us from the readings, and which we will each receive a polished copy of at the culmination of our workshop.
How will we compensate our facilitator?
I created a compensation model by keeping in mind a couple of concerns working in tension with each other:
Honoring my time, expertise, and labor developing and facilitating this workshop, which I conceptualize similarly to Sojourner Truth’s “sell[ing] the shadow to support the substance,” as taught to me by Ayana Zaire Cotton of the Seeda School.
Creating an offering with accessibility for community members. As a survivor of foster care, a single mother, and a one-time recipient of government assistance, I am keenly attuned to living with pressing economic conditions. I am also watching our U.S. government decimate services for families with deep anxiety in our present moment.
Accordingly, this workshop is an offering on a sliding scale. Funds from the highest scale will be used to provide for three registrations for community members who otherwise could not afford to attend.
What is the grounding source material for this workshop description?
Toni Cade Bambara. The Salt Eaters. 1980.
Rizvana Bradley. “Regard for One Another”: A Conversation Between Rizvana Bradley and Saidiya Hartman. Los Angeles Review of Books. 2019.
Kintra Brooks. “Myrtle’s Medicine.” Essence Magazine. January 24, 2019.
Yomaira C. Figueroa, “Faithful Witnessing as Practice: Decolonial Readings of Shadows of your Black Memory and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Hypatia. Vol. 30 No. 4. 2015.
Gabrielle P. Foreman. “Sankofa Imperatives: Black Women, Digital Methods, and the Archival Turn.” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies.Vol. 38 No. 2. 2023.
Jaki Shelton Green. “I Want to Undie You.” Family Pictures USA. PBS. 2019.
Farah Jasmine Griffin. Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature. 2021.
Saidiya Hartman. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe. Vol 26. 2006.
Jennifer Nash. How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory. 2024.
Christina Sharpe. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. 2016.
Holly Smith. “Wholeness is No Trifling Matter.” The Black Scholar. Vol. 52 No. 2. 2022.
Sojourner Truth. “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.”
This is truly a nourishing offering!