Conference Agenda

How does Black aesthetic life persist in a neighborhood navigating displacement and disinvestment? This presentation draws from “Creative Pathways for Bed-Stuy”, a participatory, parent-led inquiry where Black mothers, caregivers, and grandparents listened across the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York through interviews, art-sharing stations, community mapping, and surveys. Together, we traced how art lives in Bed-Stuy -- how it’s remembered, where it thrives, when it goes missing, and what families hope it could become. In a moment of rapid gentrification and cultural displacement, the project unearthed both the fragility and the persistence of Black creative life: elders recalling a village animated by music, hair braiding, and storytelling; parents naming uneven access to meaningful art spaces; children sketching homes, safety, and color as anchors of imagination. As part of my broader dissertation on Black femme becoming in the shadow of carcerality and spatial divestment, the Bed-Stuy site offers a grounded example of Black spaces as sites of radical generativity. In tandem with forthcoming narrative interviews with Black mothers, this work helps illuminate how Black femmes cultivate aesthetic life -- not as leisure, but as a method of care, survival, and world-making in conditions that continually attempt to constrict them. Rooted in Black feminist theory, carceral geography, and critical psychology, this work takes seriously the stakes of art as a political force -- where murals become memory, mapping becomes more than method, and dreaming becomes a practice of survival. Bed-Stuy emerges not only as a site of displacement, but as a living archive of generativity -- where Black femmes continue to craft creative futures even in the wake.

In a time of increasing environmental destruction and technological infiltration, black and brown communities continue to be spaces of creating new radical cosmologies that reclaim the possible in impossible times. Drawing on many Afrofuturist writers such as Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemison, these cosmologies weave together ancestral healing modalities from many diasporic traditions and a notion of projecting the self and the community into a better future. These futures don’t reject science and technology but rather integrate and recast concepts of quantum physics, cybernetics and AI into cultural narratives of healing, liberation, and environmental regeneration. In contrast to the current anthropocentric paradigm where black and brown communities face the heaviest burden of environmental injustice and technological exploitation, these new environmental and technical cosmologies become opportunities for agency and reclamation. Black cosmologies assist with orienting the self in space and time; connecting individuals to nature, systems and people in the past present and future. These new radical cosmologies challenge dominant colonial and western narratives that keep separate the ecological, social, psychological and spiritual micro/macrocosms of the universe. Art, media and design become mediums to more deeply explore and inhabit these cosmologies.This type of cosmology building and speculative design can be further leveraged in STEM education to inspire young black and brown folks as part of a next generation of actual world builders.

The Wu-Tang Clan, an influential hip-hop collective formed in Staten Island, New York in the early 1990s, rose to prominence for their gritty sounds and lyrical complexity - in a borough known for its mostly white population, conservative politics, and entrenched law enforcement attitudes and behavior. This collective of Black men rose to fame representing communities in Staten Island contending with racial and economic stratification, aggressive policing, cultural exclusion, and political invisibility. In a place where Black histories remain obscured by white cultural and political dominance, The Wu-Tang Clan’s music spoke to the realities, hopes, and complexities of Black people navigating and surviving these contexts in unflinching terms. In scholarly spaces, the Wu-Tang Clan has received limited, but rich attention, with research focused on cultural resistance, socio-political development, and masculinity. However, in social psychology, the rap collective’s meaning has yet to be studied. Thus, Wu-Stories uses a combination of walking oral histories, archival, and lyrical analysis to explore the social and cultural meaning of the Wu-Tang Clan to Black men on Staten Island. Furthermore, this work considers how the group’s history is remembered and shared in communities on the island, extending scholarship on Critical Consciousness and Critical Black Aesthetics. It explores research questions on the power of Black art and historical knowledge in white spaces where oppressive conditions persist - and where critical histories have been erased and co-opted; that is, whited-out. Wu-Stories opens an empirical window onto the influence of Black aesthetics in culturally white spaces, and offers a critical understanding of how Black people on Staten Island refuse social, cultural, and historical erasure in a place they call home.

This paper contrasts two conflicting approaches to mental health through the experiments of Dr. Mutulu Shakur and Dr. Edgar H. Shein. Dr. Shakur, a Black Liberation Movement activist and acupuncturist, led a community-controlled health campaign in New York City, establishing the successful “Peoples Drug Program” at Lincoln Hospital using a 5-point holistic detox protocol, coined the NADA (National Acupuncture Detoxification Association) protocol. This initiative, supported by activists from the Young Lords Party, the Republic of New Afrika, and the Black Panther Party, focused on reducing drug addiction and improving health outcomes, while centering the principles of self-determination and collective care. Conversely, Dr. Shein developed the "Marion Experiment," a behavior modification program at Marion Federal Penitentiary based on a 13-point program based on wartime brainwashing theories. His experiment served as a tool for political repression, using psychological torture and isolation tactics to control political prisoners and disrupt the prisoner rights movement. While Shein's methods relied on the tools of colonial power, like violence, Shakur’s model was rooted in Black and Indigenous traditions of wellness, through community care and power. If we are to be successful in building a healthy and just future, the field of psychology must make a clear choice between these two paths. Contemporary doctors and healers must adopt life-affirming interventions that prioritize community care and collective power, disrupt white supremacist and status quo goals, and reject tools of violence and terror. In this paper, I will discuss Shakur’s journey from community activist to political prisoner incarcerated at Marion’s Control Unit by Schein and how his work is now used globally in the field of behavioral and mental health.