Chelsey Roxanne Carter

Our world is full of inventive teaching and research spawned from creative laboratories and novel collaborations. Yet, scientific laboratories are often sites of power, privilege, and hierarchy that are usually insulated and isolated from the public or the non-white gaze. This workshop, “Black Feminist Lab Making,” pushes back against the white supremacist boundaries that enshrine the traditional scientific laboratory and discusses experimental laboratories through a Black Feminist Diasporic lens. This workshop brings anthropologists and interdisciplinary scholars together to explore how Black Feminists make labs and develop lab-making processes that rupture racial, gender, sexual, and Western hemispheric power within the academy and beyond. Participants will engage across three themes (health, medicine, and power; technology, data, and visual culture; and transnational solidarities) to (1) define what constitutes a Black feminist lab in theory and practice and (2) exchange ideas, perspectives, and strategies for how Black feminist scholars and practitioners develop their labs. Black Feminist laboratories become more than the controlled conditions in a room, building, or facility and instead catalyze capacious approaches to studying Black women and people, offer critical engagements with data, and promote and teach emancipatory ideals about Black Feminist futures that are not limited by physical or material boundaries.