Archiving blackness at York

Anique J Jordan and Evelyn Amponsah
Contributors

We, York University’s Black Graduate Student Collective, present this developing archive as a creative work in gratitude and honour of black graduate students who are part of a long tradition of scholarship produced at this institution. This archive deliberately focuses on past and present students in order to claim stake, place, and space.
We are here in recognition that blackness including scholarship, student activism, organizations, and other contributions to the academy by black people continues to be erased and made invisible. We acknowledge York as one of the most diverse higher-education institutions in Canada. Yet, York has neither a black studies department, program, nor certificate. And with menial resources allotted to hiring black faculty, the face of education at York will continue to disregard a growing need to carve out spaces for black scholars and blackness as a critical area of scholarship.
We contend that even if the university continues to attempt to erase us, we will not be erased. Rather than waiting for any institution to acknowledge and legitimize our bodies, our work, and our scholarship, we will name ourselves.
As a collective, we recognize the work of black graduate students, activists, organizers, and undergraduate counterparts. Though institutional mechanisms attempt to exclude and regulate blackness at York, we choose, much like black students and faculty in the past, to come together and insert ourselves into the historical narrative by invigorating a collective memory and adding to an archive. This work is produced here as “a project of possibility,” publicly offering a descriptor of what the intellectual labour of black students has been thus far and what we hope to continue past our time at the institution. The range of scholarship produced by black students and the areas of expertise offered through our work have and continue to create radical possibilities both inside and outside the institution.
Here, we have utilized a student newspaper as a platform. But this effort goes beyond these pages to continue naming and archiving the work of students, scholars, artists, professors, and the broader black community at York. The possibility embedded in this archive lies in the ability to see more clearly what has systematically been made invisible.
Christopher G. Smith
Thinking Otherwise: The Politics of Black Queer Filmmaking
Laura Hartley
Breaking the Box: A Radical Feminist Approach to Growing Girl’s Resistance.
Nicole Hanson
Planning for Deathscapes, Urban Planning, Culturally Specific Burials
Karen C. Flynn
Race, Class, and Gender: Black Nurses in Ontario, 1950-1980
Camille Turner
Evoking a Site of Memory: An Afrofuturist Sonic Walk that Maps Toronto’s Black Geographies
Neil M. Livingston
Complex Systems Analysis
Evelyn Amponsah
Misapprehensions of the Slave: Old Formations of Slavery and Renewed Understandings of Subjectivity
Lina Nasr El Hag Ali
Critical Security Studies
Ola Mohammed
Black Cultural Studies, Sound Studies, Hip Hop Studies, Black Feminist Thought, Afrofuturism, and Race and Technology
Cecil A. Foster
Blackness and Canada: A Phenomenological Exploration
Katherine McKittrick
Demonic Grounds: Black Women, Geography, and the Poetics of Landscape
Kevin Gosine
Living Between Stigma and Status: An Exploration of the Social Identities, Experiences, and Perceptions of High-Achieving Black Canadians
Aaron Kamugisha
Abducting Western Civilization: Coloniality, Citizenship, and Liberation in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition
Raimunda D. Reece
Caged (No)bodies: Exploring the Racialized and Gendered Politics of Incarceration of Black Women in the Canadian Prison System
Nailah Keleta-Mae
(Re) Positioning Myself: Female and Black in Canada
Nailah Dahlia Peters
Spoken From This Urban Place, From These Dark Lips: Using Space, Place, and Poetry to Investigate My Lived Experience as a Woman of African Descent in the New Urban Environment
Anique J. Jordan
Possessed: A Genealogy of Black Women, Hauntology, and the Art of Survival
Aku Brown
Curriculum Development, Black Female Youth, Transnational Feminisms
Mosa McNeilly
Black Radical Imagination, Middle Passage Memory, the Sacred, Art and
Performance
Charmaine Lurch
Art, Black female subject, Hyper-visibility/invisibility, flux
Brandon Hay
Black Masculinity and Love, Incarcerated Black Fathers, and Reintegration
Chevy Eugene
Film, Caribbean Integration, Cultural Production
Frank Frances
Getting to Trane: The Politics of Race and Jazz in Toronto
Charlotte Henay
Indigenous and Afro-descendant Communities in Diaspora, Poetry of Witness, Afro-Indigenous Futurities & Relationships of Imagining
Pere de Roy
Discourses on Trafficking in Guyana
Tracy Locke
Black Feminist Perspectives on Black Women’s Health
Runako Gregg
Race/Racism, Political Economy, Black Radical Thought, and Caribbean Studies.
Alejandro Campos Garcia
Race/Racism in Cuba
Shana Calixte
Girl Guide Associations in the Caribbean, HIV/AIDS Education, Oral Histories, Displacement
Toni Francis
Laws and Policies on Human Trafficking in South Africa and Canada
Valerie Thomas
Women in Grenada
Charmaine Crawford
Transnational Migration and Caribbean Women
Charles Simon-Aaron
Class Ideology and African Political Theory
Iheanyi M. Enwerem
The Politicization of Religion in Modern Nigeria: The Emergence and Politics of the Christian Association of Nigeria
Asheda Dwyer
The Politics of Chanting down Babylon: Re-reading the 1960 Reports on the Rastafar-I of Kingston, Jamaica
Enwerem M. Feanyi
Socialist Imperatives in Africa: A Critical Examination
Latoya Lazarus
The Church and the Law:  Examining the Role of Christianity in Shaping Sexual Politics in Jamaica
Betty Ann Henry
The Socio-Economic Marginalisation of Fat Black Women and its Relevance for Contemporary Labour Practices
Olukayode Ayankojo
Diasporic Community, Cultural Identity and the Internet : A Study of Diasporic Nigerians in Toronto
Tara Burke
“Steal Away:” The Commodification of the Black Gospel Choir
Tesfaye Kumsa
Media, Human Rights and Development in Ethiopia
Boke Saisi
Black Diasporic Disasters and the Africanization of Poverty in Western Print Media: A Case Study of Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian Earthquake in TheNew York Times
Nikki Yeboah
Poverty Inc: An Investigation into the Commodification of Poverty
Seon Tyrell
Capitalism and The Phantasmal: Political Economy of Death and Dying
Deidre D-Lishus Walton
Full Circle: Black Women Perform Identity and Spirituality in Diaspora
Michael Joseph
Education for Steelpan
Dadrien Brown
Northern Nigerian Court Cases From the Early 20th Century
Tina Garnett
Creating Culturally Safe Trauma Supports for Indigenous and Black Women
Francine Buchner
The Black Presence in the Old Testament: Empowering Youth
Anan Lololi
Community Food Security
Shawnee Hardware
Multiliteracies Pedagogy and English Teaching in Jamaican Inner-City Classrooms
Onyekachi Nwoke
Shell and the Nigerian Government in Ogoniland: Community Perceptions to Oil
Ciann Wilson
Sexuality, AIDS, and Racialization Globally
Chelsea Fung
Environmental Justice, Necropolitics, Racism
Arlene Jardine
Street Soldiers: Exploring the Use of Urban Arts Therapy as a Means of Unpacking Trauma for Youth
Karen Naidoo
Shielding the Pain: Mental Health, Caribbean Women, and Settlement in Toronto
Tamara Estwick
Three Little Birds: The Voices of Rastafari Sistren
Melissa Dean
Learning for Liberation: Critical Black Poetry Pedagogy and Transformative Education.
Olobunmi Oyinsan
Orature and Women’s Film in Africa and its Diaspora
Syrus Marcus Ware
Disability Arts and Contemporary Practice: Experiences of Racialized Disabled Artists
Kwesi Kafele
African Canadian Communities and Masculinity
Nathan Okonta
Race, Education, and Schooling
Janice J. Anderson
DisMANtling Mastercodes: A Gyne-logical Intervention Towards Constitutive Hue-myn Sorority
Sam Tecle
Charting the Perspectives, Attitudes and Ambivalences of East African Diasporas towards Blackness, Black Culture, and Black Identification
Desmond Miller
The Post-Game: Retrospectives of the Experiences of Canadian Black Student-Athletes on US Athletics Scholarships
Rhonda George
Education, Africentric Schooling, Student-Athletes, Black Women
Selom Chapman-Nyaho
Youth, Risk and Regulation, Qualitative Methods and Race
Rita Nketiah
The Transnational Life of the Second-Generation: A Case Study of Ghanaian-Canadian Youth