Projects in Radical Love as Praxis

Radical Love as Black Girl Friendship

With Dr. Sam White, Ph.D. in Childhood Studies, Rutgers University-Camden, sdw117@scarletmail.rutgers.edu and Crystal Hawkins, Independent Scholar, Black maternal health activist, and labor and delivery nurse, crystalnhawkins@gmail.com

In this project, we consider Black girl friendship as a space for healing, play, and fortification in young people’s collective strivings for justice. We share insights learned from and with Black girls across a range of diverse sites and in our own lifescapes, as differently racialized and queer female scholars. We engage a conversation across an ethnographic field (small public high school in Camden, New Jersey), an archive of African-American girlhoods (collective beauty practices and friendships in the 1920s and 30s to redefine beauty), and sites of Black maternal justice advocacy. We draw upon a critical body of work from Black and Latinx feminists (including Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Jennifer Nash, Ruth Nicole Brown, and Gloria Cervantes-Soon) and queer thinkers (including Ann Cvetovich and Jose Esteban Munoz) to articulate a framework of radical love. These transformative thinkers have long articulated how radical love is active and necessary for social movement building–it connects love as humanization to boundary crossing, shifting alignments of power, and collective justice work. While societal representations of Black girls create wounding effects in spite of Black girls’ crafting, their friendship claims space in a world that is too unforgiving, too harsh, and too harming of Blackness and girlhood. Can Black girl friendship transform our world? We believe it can.

A Pedagogy of Radical Love and the Abolition of Childhood Sexual Abuse

This project also draws upon a framework of radical love to offer praxis around the abolition of childhood sexual abuse. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I respond to an urgent need to deepen our theorizing and scholarly action at the intersection of feminism, childhood studies, and the social construction of childhood sexual abuse. Childhood studies have centered children and youth from diverse historical, literary, cultural and social contexts. But we have not generally engaged with #MeToo or formulated a praxis around the abolition of childhood sexual abuse. I want to complicate conceptions of agency, innocence, and children’s participation within this diverse field in order to propose a framework of collective-based agency, care, and transformative justice (here I draw upon the work of Erica Meiners and Ann Russo, as well as #MeToo and GenerationFIVE).

Reimagining Youth Work in Camden: Stories of Invisible Carework, Radical Love, and Transformation

With Brian Phillips, brianph@camden.rutgers.edu and Alejandra Baraja, alejandra.barajas@rutgers.edu Co-Program Coordinators, Rutgers Future Scholars Program

In this manuscript, we take a close, critical and loving look at what we do—our commitments, responsibilities and everyday engagements in youth work across Camden, New Jersey.  We explore the urgent and often unseen (or unrecognized narratives) about everyday engagement in our college access program—the Rutgers Future Scholars Program—and we draw upon six years of feminist ethnography in a local school, MetEast High School.  We pay attention to the “invisible carework” (Wendy Luttrell) that sustains our efforts, our communities, and our outcomes.  We acknowledge our different positionalities and unique identities and how these diversities enrich our collective thinking, writing, and acting.  In this collaboration, we draw upon Black, Latinx, feminist, and queer perspectives on carework, radical love, and kinship.  Engagement with these ideas provides provocation, imagination, and new directions for practice, policy, and theorizing our youth work as well as young people’s educational trajectories & attainment.  

Queer Kinship as Radical Pedagogy: Urban Education and Participation Flows

With Rashmi Kumari, PhD Candidate in Childhood Studies, Rutgers-Camden, rl698@scarletmail.rutgers.edu

Rashmi Kumari and I draw upon queer kinship and radical love to explore our collaboration in teaching urban education at Rutgers University-Camden. We are both feminist ethnographers and together we explore webs of care, critical civic engagement, and narratives of harm and liberation with Black, Latinx, and White undergraduate students and young people (mostly Black and Latinx) in our urban education course at Rutgers-Camden.  As part of the course, our undergrads co-design creative storytelling clubs with children in afterschool programs based in Camden, NJ.  The webs of care we explore move beyond classroom (between instructors and students, students and students, and students and children) as the roles of educator and learner are blurred in transformative ways.  Further, Rashmi’s class went online in Spring 2020 during the pandemic, so we also look at care and education within this unprecedented space.  We draw upon ideas from queer kinship and Black & Indigenous feminist ideas of radical love to push back against capitalist economies of “carework” and emotional labor.  Instead, we offer a multidimensional perspective on care and education that is transformative across intrapersonal, relational, and institutional levels.