Black Feminist Eco Lab
Want to change the world? Action needs ideas. Action needs excitement, hope, and debate. We 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.
Mission
We are a community of change agents moving and working through a Black Feminist ethos across space, race, gender, disciplines and geographies. We will generate scholarship, best practices, ideas, art, world-making and community-building strategies that remain present in all circumstances we might recognize as phenomenal, ordinary, and everything in between.
Vision
The world we hope for is one grounded in wide ranging ways of knowing and living. We work toward this vision through theories of aliveness. We seek to create cycles of practice that promote day-to-day methods which orient us toward futures rooted in collective joy, action, change, and fulfillment. We engage a praxis that recognizes the interconnected challenges of survival found across urban, rural, and Indigenous practices as interconnected. We project a collaborative approach to these relations of struggle which centers collective strategies and repair.
Model of Aliveness
The Black Feminist Eco Lab Model of Aliveness is a relational framework that understands life, knowledge, and transformation as emergent through interconnected ecologies. Grounded in Black feminist thought, the model brings together biotics (living relations, histories, and practices), abiotics (structures, resources, and institutional conditions), and change (processes of care, refusal, restoration, and reimagining) to illuminate how aliveness is cultivated. At its center are dynamic inter/trans ecological formations across species, disciplines, geographies, institutions, cultures, and temporalities, demonstrating that thriving is iterative and interdependent. The model invites us to understand transformation as cyclical and generative, offering a framework for how we might work together to create more just and livable worlds.
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.
Read the Standpoints edited volumes: Standpoints: Black Feminist Knowledges and Black Feminist Theorizing Toward Futurity: A Standpoints Volume
