Monique Azzara

The United States has entered a critical era of political racial polarizations, with Black Lives Matter becoming the largest civil rights movement in history. In the midst of this emerging moment of extreme racial tensions, Black Church activism remains significant for contesting the racial violence and structural discrimination that impacts Black lives. African American women, who form the backbone of the Black Church, continue to provide the critical labor central to this activism. Additionally, Black women provide the labor and monetary support for worship, to build fellowship and care networks, and maintain church programs. This project examines Black women?s churchlabor and activism in Los Angeles by centering spirituality through an intersectional and affective framework that calls attention to Black women and their creative agency in the production of knowledge. The overarching goal of this project is to understand how the spiritual dimensions of churchlabor and activism inform Black women?s epistemologies. In doing so, I aim to understand the potential of this knowledge as active responses to the ongoing iterations of race and racial regimes in the United States.