Futures and Black Digital Humanities

Research in Africana Futures and Black Digital Humanities is seeing unprecedented support. This talk will focus on how new institutional support from foundations allows scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists the institutional space to build sustainable infrastructure within HBCUs to support Black Digital Humanities and Afrofuturism projects and scholarship.

Toniesha L. Taylor is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Communication in the Communication Studies Department in the School of Communication at Texas Southern University. Her research melds the boundaries of Womanist Rhetoric, Afrofuturism Studies, Inter-cultural Communication, Gender Communication, and Digital Humanities.!"#Toniesha’s recent research and conference presentations center on womanist rhetoric as method and theory; practical social justice pedagogy for faculty and students; and digital hu-manities methods for activist recovery projects. Recent publications include “World-Making or World Breaking?: A Black Womanist Perspective on Social Media Crises in Higher Education.” Communication Education 68, no. 3 (July 3, 2019): 381–85.

https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2019.1607884 and “Reflections on Sandra Bland on the 3rd Anniversary of Her Death” to the Online Roundtable on Sandra Bland, Black Perspectives, July 13, 2018, aaihs.org."#Dr. Taylor is working with colleagues on two major grant-funded projects one with the NIH fo-cused on increasing the equitable inclusion of POCs in medical trials. The second is a Mellon Foundation-funded DEFCon to increase collaboration and inclusion of POC scholars in digital humanities. Dr. Taylor is an affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies at NYU and a National Teaching partner for the Colored Conventions Project."