• Fighting to Heal: How Survivors are Finding Strength in Martial Arts

    Fighting to Heal: How Survivors are Finding Strength in Martial Arts

    After 6 months of collecting stories about why women participate in combat sports, such as Muay Thai, kickboxing, judo, jiu-jitsu, MMA, and more, I started to review my findings and realized, without anticipating it, that many women were sharing stories of overcoming violence and trauma and using martial arts as an outlet and a means of healing.…

  • Black Code, Guest Edited by Jessica M. Johnson + Mark Anthony Neal

    Black Code, Guest Edited by Jessica M. Johnson + Mark Anthony Neal

    The Black Scholar is proud to announce the release of “Black Code,” by guest editors Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal. Johnson and Neal have assembled a collective of digital soothsayers working on the margins of Black Studies, Afrofuturism, radical media, and the digital humanities. Black Code Studies is queer, femme, fugitive, and radical; as…

  • Writing A Book In And Of Real Life: An interview with Tressie McMillan Cottom

    Writing A Book In And Of Real Life: An interview with Tressie McMillan Cottom

    The name of Tressie McMillan Cottom should be familiar to HASTAC Scholars. She is a HASTAC Steering Committee member. She was on The Daily Show, interviewed by Trevor Noah at http://www.cc.com/video-clips/nsqb7g/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-tre…. And she is a plenary speaker for this year’s HASTAC conference in Orlando, Florida, from November 2 through November 4, 2017, at http://hastac2017.org. During…

  • Pausing to Reflect

    Pausing to Reflect

    This has been… a big year. While the Futures Initiative team and I formally reflect on the past year through the exercise of writing and designing our annual report, and while we plan for an unusual year ahead, I’d like to take a moment and offer a more personal reflection as well. In working on our…

  • Orwell: The Right to Internet Privacy and Why There May Be Hope Yet (or Not)

    Orwell: The Right to Internet Privacy and Why There May Be Hope Yet (or Not)

    Like most who attended high school in the States, I read George Orwell’s proverbial classic Nineteen Eighty-Four as a teenager, and (as every good eighteen-year-old in America should be) was frightened by the book’s implications and depictions of the cultism that can arise in a totalitarian society run by an omnipresent authority figure. Upon discovering…

  • Let’s talk about women…

    Let’s talk about women…

    This post has been a long time coming as I struggled to find the right tone and direction for the anger I felt over the very public silencing of Elizabeth Warren a few weeks back.  As Women’s History month approached and murmurs of the March 8th protest gained momentum, I began to think about why…