Want to change the world? Action needs ideas. Action needs excitement, hope, and debate. We at the School for Cultural and Social Transformation are ready to think with you. Ready to shape the leaders—you—who will put ideas into forceful motion. To act, we must think. We want to think with you.
Vision
The Black Feminist Eco Lab (BFEL) hopes to bring together a community of broadly defined intellectuals, advocates, artists, activists, learners, and practitioners. We hope to create a new paradigm of what a thriving, inclusive ecosystem operating on former and ever-changing theoretical frameworks for Black feminism can embody. Our aliveness model, involving biotics and abiotics within the ecosystem, centers ethics in an unethically-oriented world. The BFEL rejects the world’s determinism to shape the many permutations of being alive and untethered. Within this environment, we will generate scholarship, best practices, ideas, and community-building strategies that emerge from a spectrum of phenomenal circumstances to ordinary and unexceptional narratives.
Standpoints
Standpoints is a podcast for living and loving blackness. Hosts Andrea N. Baldwin, Jenaya Amore, and former co-host Trichia Cadette welcome guests who explore Black feminist experiences within a scholarly, pedagogical, and community-based praxis of care. The Standpoints Podcast is a partnership with the Black Feminist Eco Lab and Virginia Tech Publishing.
Workshop
In the Summer of 2023, the BFEL is hosting a workshop called: "Working at Aliveness at the University of Utah."
The BFEL is a collective of University of Utah faculty, staff and graduate students focused on ecological integrity using a Black feminist lens to work toward ways in which all living beings (particularly those most susceptible to oppression and death in these times of pandemics and environmental destruction) can exist in relationships of care, love and joy. We live and work in a city that is suffering from severe drought and experiencing the loss of habitat from the shrinking Salt Lake. We are particularly interested in how, in the age of the Anthropocene, human and non-human beings that have been historically valued for what they can provide within a capitalist society—labor and natural resources—are striving to stay alive, and more than that, embrace aliveness.
Our goal is to produce a rich, vibrant scholarship and praxis which brings together a community of intellectuals, advocates, artists, activists, learners, and practitioners to create a new paradigm of what a thriving, inclusive ecosystem operating on the fluid theoretical frameworks for Black feminism can embody. To achieve this goal, we have developed a Black Feminist Aliveness Model (BFAM) which uses Black feminist and ecological theorizing, involves the biotics and abiotics within our ecosystems, and centers an ethics of care. We envision this model as the methodological grounding for our 2024 Working at Aliveness workshop.
Dr. Andrea N. Baldwin
FounderAndrea N. Baldwin is an associate professor in the divisions of Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies in the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah.
She is an attorney-at-law who holds a master’s degree in international trade policy and a Ph.D. in gender and development studies from the University of the West Indies Cave Hill campus in Barbados.
Dr. Baldwin has several publications, including her 2021 book monograph, "A Decolonial Black Feminist Theory of Reading and Shade: Feeling the University;" 2019 and 2023 co-edited texts in the Standpoints Black feminisms book series with Virginia Tech Publishing, and a 2023 co-edited Global Black feminisms volume.
She is the creator and co-host of Standpoints, a Black feminist podcast produced by Virginia Tech Publishing, and the co-curator of the Caribbean feminist series for Black Women Radicals.
Dr. Baldwin was born and raised on the small Caribbean Island state of Barbados. She considers herself an all-around Caribbean woman and loves everything coconut and soca.
Cydney Caradonna
Graduate FellowCydney Y. Caradonna is a queer Latinx scholar, activist, and poet originally from the California Bay Area.
She currently lives in the Salt Lake Valley and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership in Policy at the University of Utah. She has a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and master’s degree in Higher Education Administration and Leadership.
Her scholarly praxis explores the systems and potential ruptures that inform a de/carceral ethos for higher education. Caradonna’s poetry centers the similar tensions to her academic work and research and experiences along multiple systems of marginalization and how we unsettle those systems by speaking back to them.
Caradonna’s interdisciplinary approach to inquiry and praxis in higher education has included grant supported research in intersectional studies, policy discourse analysis, and Feminist methodological theory.
Caradonna currently works for the Utah Prison Education Project supporting higher education in prison programming, research and publishing while working to create a Black Feminist Eco Lab in the School of Cultural and Social Transformation.
Chelsea N. Bouldin
Ph.D. Candidate & University FellowChelsea N. Bouldin is an Octavia E. Butler scholar, doctoral candidate and University Fellow in the Cultural Foundations of Education program and is pursuing a Certificate of Advanced Study in Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University.
Her work and embodied ethos co-creates worlds that embrace expansive processes of knowing, expression, and being. “How might Afrofuturistic literature serve as a tool for us Black women, girls, and femmes to chart ourselves?” is her most persistent query.
Flavorful food, Black sci-fi, boundless writing, impromptu exploration, and laughing endlessly fill her dreamiest days.
Dr. Crystal S. Rudds
Assistant Professor & FellowCrystal S. Rudds received her PhD from the University of Illinois and is assistant professor of African American literature and culture in the Department of English at the University of Utah. She served as the assistant editor to Audrey Petty for the oral history High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing and is currently working on a book project that explores representations of public housing in film, African American literature, photography, and Black men’s qualitative narratives. Dr. Rudds’ other research/teaching interests include Black feminist theories and ecological praxis, Afrofuturism, literary ethnography, and digital expressions of Black Spatial Humanities.
With an MFA from Indiana University, she also publishes creative work that has appeared in Obsidian, NightBallet Press, After Hours Press, Midnight & Indigo and, as part of the collective poem, American Gun, published by Big Shoulders Books.
Nana Brantuo
AdvisorDr. Nana Brantuo is a highly skilled researcher, educator, and advocate dedicated to addressing systemic inequalities and centering marginalized populations. With a background in education policy and leadership, curriculum and instruction, and African studies, she specializes in interdisciplinary research, policy analysis, and advocacy. As a non-residential fellow at the University of San Diego Kroc School VIP Lab, Dr. Brantuo focuses on researching transnational systemic violence against Black migrants seeking refuge. As the founder and principal of Diaspora Praxis, LLC, she provides clients with comprehensive research, policy, and technical products, emphasizing data-driven insights and strategic recommendations. Dr. Brantuo is deeply engaged in service work, holding roles on the board of directors at The Person Center, contributing to FAIR SHARE's Data Advisory Committee, and providing thought leadership at the Africa Data Governance Hub Advisory Council. She is also enrolled in the Center for AI and Digital Policy's AI Policy Certificate program, furthering her expertise in ethical AI governance
Jocelyn Navarro
Visiting ScholarJocelyn Navarro is a Mexican-American scholar from Southern California. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, while holding a bachelor’s degree in botany with minors in environmental studies and gender & women studies. Navarro studies the effects of anthropogenic climate change on plant communities in water-limited environments, and how these changes alter ecosystem functioning. Her research has taken her to several beautiful places all over the world such as Colorado, Arizona, Peru, Norway and South Africa to collect data. Navarro recognizes humans are not always included in scientific discussions about the environment, and would like to make her work more interdisciplinary to include the effects of anthropogenic climate change on humans. She enjoys spending time outdoors and wants to make these spaces more safe and accessible to people who have been historically excluded from these spaces, such as people of color and people with disabilities. Navarro is honored to be a part of the Black Feminist Eco Lab in the School for Cultural & Social Transformation.