Faculty Discussion at a Mixer

Black Research Symposium 2024

Deepening Connections
March 27, 1 - 7 p.m.

Last year the African American Cultural Center and NC State University Libraries invited our NC State campus and surrounding community to our first Black Research Symposium.  As the first of its kind on NC State’s campus, the Black Research Symposium featured Black diasporic learning, scholarship, and epistemologies via cutting-edge research, storytelling, creative works, discussion circles, community-based projects, and industry initiatives from the NC State campus and surrounding community.

While work to plan the next full research symposium, we want to continue to “Deepen Connections.”  Mark your calendar for our upcoming spring research event on March 27, 2024.

Deepen connections to your cultural perspective and research involvement. Attend the event and connect with a mentor, participate in a research round table, build your research brand, and engage in community conversation with your peers.

Open Sessions

Join us for the opening panel and community conversation “Rooted Identities and Thriving Futures: Fostering Innovation, Heritage, and Community in Research Across the African Diaspora.”  This session is open to all participants. We will host a networking/mentoring reception to conclude the event.  Faculty, staff, alumni, and students are all invited to register and find their mentor or mentee.

To view the schedule click here.

 

Register

Get Involved

How can I get involved?
We are looking for students to present, attend sessions, and for faculty and staff to register to be a mentor to a student on campus.  If you are interested in these roles, please use the button below to register.  We will reach out in March to group undergraduate students into research roundtables. For undergraduate students, who are new to research roundtable, this is the perfect event for you.  All levels of experience are welcome, including research projects that are in process.  As we get closer to the event, we will host a practice session (for undergraduate students) prior to the symposium.
  • For undergraduate students, we are currently seeking students to participate in research roundtables. Register below to receive more information. All levels of experience are welcome. We will have a practice session in March and group students into research roundtables during that time. Undergraduate students are also welcome to attend the opening community conversation/ and panel. For more information on the undergraduate research roundtables, please read our short guide.
  • For graduate students, register to attend our opening community conversation and panel; as well as attend the sessions hosted by the Black Graduate Student Association.
  • For faculty and staff, register to attend our opening community conversation and panel; and the mentoring/networking session.
Register
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Andaiye Qaasim (assistant director, African American Cultural Center).

Guiding Principles

The symposium will embrace and reflect following guiding principles. Please download the Grounding Document to learn more about the symposium.

  • Practice Sankofa – learning from the past to build a future.
  • Be Futuristic – building on theories of afrofuturism (Womack, 2013), African futurism (Okorafor, 2019; Wabuke, 2020), and astro-Blackness (Anderson & Jones, 2016), these theories imagine a future where Black people do indeed exist, free from white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, extreme capitalism, and the violence of imperial wars. The “work of the imagination” as Robin D. G. Kelley frames it, offers us tools to craft “new visions” in a radical act of worldbuilding (Kelley, 2022).
  • Embody Ubuntu – build with and alongside community; increase capacity; honor our interconnectedness; build solidarity.
  • Each One Teach One – everyone has knowledge to share; decenter hierarchical power dynamics, center lived experiences and stories; cultivate intergenerational interactions and learning opportunities.
  • Foster Harambee – champion mutually supportive and relational ways of engaging with community, be relevant; offer solutions; share resources; ground theory in practice/praxis
  • Be Sustainable – create structures and systems that are equitable and just; be good stewards of our resources; build systems and institutions that can be replicated.
  • Be Emergent – value transformation, change, creativity, growth, and innovation; center relational ways of being; overstand that the process is just as important as the finished product (“emergent”) (Brown, 2017).
  • Rest as Revolution – nurture holistic practices and spirituality; be whole; be authentic.

Marginality

“Marginality [is] much more than a site of deprivation. In fact I was saying just the opposite: that it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.” – bell hooks / Marginality As a Site of Resistance, 1990

 “Because black people have been excluded from the category human, we have a particular epistemic and ontological mobility. Unburdened by investments in belonging to a system created to exclude us in the first place, we develop marvelous modes of being in and perceiving the universe. I am claiming that there is real power to be found in such an untethered state—the power to destabilize the very idea of human supremacy and allow for entirely new ways to relate to each other and to the postapocalyptic ecologies, both organic and inorganic, in which we are enmeshed.”

– Jayna Brown/ Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021)