Whether writing poetry, sermons, or scholarly publications, my work centers Black narratives, bodies, and epistemologies through the fields of religion, technology, and ethnography in order to document, analyze, and engage sites of Black liberation. To this end I illuminate the impact and outcomes of religion and technology in Black life, especially at the intersection of social networks and religious life among Black young adults. Moreover, I provide innovative approaches to and apply digital tools to the documentation of Black religion. In sum, cultural criticism, Black imaginaries, and freedom animate my research, teaching, and service.
My work is guided by three primary questions: What are the essential methodological tools for Black cultural criticism? What are Black vision/futures, historically and at present? And how do I best serve and center the physical, intellectual, and spiritual liberation of African diasporic peoples?
In response to the first question, I interrogate culturally and religiously assumed knowledge through the lens of critical race theory. In my ethnographic practices, I use poetry, hip hop, and other Black rhetorical strategies like whooping (Black climatic preaching) or testifying to critique texts, bodies, and social imaginaries that have historically operated as accepted canon. I draw on Black womanists/feminists and Black religion theory and social networking analysis to conceive of research and teaching approaches that unapologetically center the complex Black my/self.
In response to the second question, I am concerned with Black folk imaginaries. Taking such ways of knowing as a guide, my work reimagines what “legitimate” epistemologies ought to look, feel, and sound like. I choose the nommo or feeling or spirit (e.g., the gospel song “I got a feeling everything’s gonna be alright”) of Black life, text, and experiences in conducting ethnography.
With regard to the third question, this is freedom work for me. My scholarly pursuits are connected to the intellectual, spiritual, and material liberation of Black people. As this statement demonstrates, my research and service meld this commitment through my mentorship of students and faculty new to the digital humanities.
By centering my research, teaching, and service on these questions, I have developed an innovative approach to the study of digital Black religion. I build on the work of other Black media scholars like Jonathan Walton, Marla Frederick, and Tamara Lomax to investigate both the digital in religion and religion in the digital. I am one of only a handful of scholars who either have published or are in the process of publishing book-length considerations of digital Black religion. My research, teaching, and service trajectory demonstrates a significant early career impact in this area.
Research
Over the past four years I have moved from investigating my own research questions to leading the development of a new field of inquiry. Since 2018, my IRB-approved ethnographic study on digital religion has led to date to the publication of my key findings through three peer-reviewed articles, two invited guest editorships for peer-reviewed journals, a single-authored volume, a co-edited volume, workshops, and other projects with leading scholars in digital Black religion. All of this has led to my present work of mentoring undergraduate and graduate students, hosting workshops and events, and creating digital space for others working in digital Black religion.
Ethnography
A significant aspect of my research has entailed an IRB-approved study of young adult Black religious practices. Over a two-year period, I was the Principal Investigator in a study of the digital and discursive religious practices of Black Christian young adults. The study ultimately consisted of 10 direct interviews, 500 hours of digital and in-person participant observations, and the data mining and text analysis of more than 50,000 comments and/or exchanges on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Periscope among five Black Christians who could be defined as “influencers.” These findings were coupled with social network analyses of other young Black Christians’ online interactions in order to locate common concerns and topics regarding their religious identity and beliefs. This longitudinal approach allowed an in-depth analysis of the shifting practices of five young Black Christians with large online audiences. In that study, I employed a grounded approach, locating common word occurrences across interviews, song and rap lyrics, and transcriptions of social media posts and comments. I then developed a conditional matrix to identify overarching concerns/issues among digital Black Christians. I created fifty-five codes for the textual analysis of 488 documents. I applied codes ranging from “evangelism” to “Blackness” were applied to 758 excerpts and ultimately segmented these into four key areas of importance for digital Black Christians: relationships, Blackness and gender as secondary identities to faith, visibility, and valuation.
These four topics demonstrated a heavy emotional desire for and attachment to intimacy among contemporary young Black Christians. My research subjects’ involvement in social media and hip hop underscored their deeper concern for closeness (sexual, spiritual, and fraternal self-disclosure) in the digital age.
Single-Authored Monograph
In my forthcoming monograph titled Networking the Black Church: Digital Black Christians and Hip Hop (formerly titled Digital Black Christians: A Hip Hop Ethnography in pre-production stage, NYU Press), I argue that the digital mode of narration and self-revelation which occupies much of Black young adults’ online interactions must inform both how scholars document these young lives and how digital Black researchers “come clean” about their own subjectivity. I intersperse my own performance work throughout the book to do this. The work of performance/media scholars such as E. Patrick Johnson and John L. Jackson animates my own research concerns regarding performativity. What I call “networked racial-religious performativity” or simply “webwork” pays special attention to the racial and religious dimensions of digital Black Christians online and hip hop practices and identity. Via spoken word, I simulate the hyper-mediatization of digital Black Christianity through a dialogic approach to hip hop and Black Church traditions of flow, call and response, and whooping as a way of both performing and centering the rhetorical strategies that are at the heart of digital Black meaning-making.
I expand the boundaries of important preliminary work on the study of young Black culture by centering my analysis on the discursive practices of digital Black Christian experience. Most current qualitative and quantitative studies of young Black religious experience only document the “committed traditionalist” in Protestant Black churches (i.e., regular church and weekly prayer meeting attendees—see “2014 Religious Landscape Study” and the “2005 Black Youth Project Survey”), while my work takes the study of religion beyond these physical and more narrowly defined spaces. Earlier studies were even more limited, focusing only on in-person young adult and youth groups at Protestant Black churches. Networking the Black Church is the first book-length consideration of the digital-religion practices of Black young adults.
Given my innovative approach to ethnography, I was awarded the highly competitive, Lily Endowed-Louisville Institute First Book Grant for Scholars of Color (for the 2018-2019 academic year). This award allowed me the space to consider and expand my earlier ethnographic work. While I had identified and coded the words of eight self-identified Black Christians between the ages of 25-39 and two slightly older informants, in order to streamline the coding process and avoid duplication, I summarized emergent codes in the descriptions of five research subjects in my book manuscript. The book’s chapters I then divided into “stories” about each of the five research subjects. Along with documenting their early engagement with the Black Church, I discussed their digital-religious practices were discussed comparatively with those of other research subjects and the young Black Christians with whom they regularly engaged online and at physically located events.
Other Publications
During the Louisville Grant year I also completed a co-edited volume titled Beyond Christian Hip Hop: Towards Christians and Hip Hop (Routledge 2019), which is part of a series edited by leading scholars in hip hop and religion Anthony Pinn and Monica Miller. The work pairs my ongoing interest in religion and youth with an in-depth examination of hip hop. Beyond Christian Hip Hop attends to present debates among hip hop and religion scholars regarding the role of Christianity in popular culture. As such, it provides a much needed and anticipated contribution to the field, and at the same time makes good on my on-going commitments to situating religion and hip hop in Africana Studies and joins a lively debate on religion’s place in the world of hip hop.
Over the last few years my work has received recognition through a number of invitations to review books and write endorsements, serve on the editorial review board for The Journal of Hip Hop Studies, sit on an honors and a dissertation committee at other institutions, and most recently, to provide an expert interview for an upcoming documentary with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Pew Research Center regarding religion and Black millennials. Additionally, I have authored and/or received scholarly mention in The Conversation, Religion News Services, and The Christian Century.
Digital Humanities
My work at the intersection of digital humanities and Black religion bridges significant gaps in both areas of study. While many scholars of digital religion make use of ethnographic tools in their work, these tools are varied and Black digital religion studies in particular lacks a systematic body of tools or approaches. Since joining the University of Arizona, I have significantly increased my expertise in the effective use of qualitative research software and data collection through data mining. As a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Digital Humanities, I have collaborated with the Center Director Dr. Bryan Carter and other data scientists to create data visualization tools for researching religious life among Black millennials. In 2018, I was selected to participate in the highly competitive CUNY Graduate Center’s Digital Humanities Research Institute. I emerged from that experience invigorated by the many tools and skills I practiced for conducting digital research and I have been asked to serve as a mentor to other faculty at the Institute. In “The Holes in My Blackness: Digital Tools and Approaches to the Study of Young Black Women,” an invited article for a forthcoming special edition of The Black Scholar (a premier peer-reviewed journal in Black Studies) I argue for the use of tools and approaches particular to the digital lives of young Black women, such as attending to their engagement in discourses regarding the late Breonna Taylor. Using the text mining software DiscoverText, I employ critical race methodology to “see” young Black women’s emancipatory work, or what I call networks of freedom, located in #BreonnaTaylor.
My most recent guest editorship of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s Fire!!! A Multimedia Journal of Black Studies in many ways represents the culmination of my research to date. It not only gathers together much of the research on digital Black religion, it also introduces other emerging voices essential to the conversation on digital Black religion’s approaches, definitions, and theories by centering my ongoing consideration of freedom in my introduction to the Special Edition titled “‘My People Are Free!’: Theorizing the Digital Black Church.”
TEACHING
My research agenda has greatly enlivened my approach to teaching. Given my growing expertise in millennial studies, I have found relevant entry points in assignments and classroom dialogue with a student population of mostly millennials, along with an ever-increasing born-digital student population. For instance, in AFAS 302: “Africana Studies Research Approaches,” I assigned recently published readings grounded in the study of Black digital users. Our in-class discussions evinced both students’ fascination with this under-discussed topic and their deep appreciation for literature that reflects their own experiences as young people and students of color. This conversation on digital technology and Black content creators was followed up with an extra credit assignment. I invited students to assist in my digital ethnography project and in so doing they could learn methods for conducting online observation of research subjects. Through this process students were exposed, in real ways, to the pitfalls and ethical challenges researchers encounter when studying vulnerable populations. This approach to learning aided students in thinking critically about more traditional concerns in the discipline, and it prepared them for conducting research in the emerging field of digital ethnography.
In another course, AFAS 220: “Introduction to African American Studies,” I use contemporary news article reflections to lay bare for students the ways in which history continues to inform recent events. Each week, students select news articles or a historical document regarding African Americans. Along with discussing their views and opinions, I ask them to comment on the piece’s connection to Africana Studies. This exercise has provided an accessible entry point for understanding theoretical approaches to the study of African Americans and their history. My students have noted their eagerness to participate in the discussion and the tremendous amount of information they learned through this exercise. Both verbally and in written reviews, students have given this course highly favorable marks for their satisfaction both with this assignment and the course in general.
For me, teaching continues to be a dialogic process. I spend considerable time prior to class carefully selecting readings and approaches to the presentation of those texts and my lectures in class.A deep desire to connect with my students in ways that are meaningful beyond our class meeting time within their various disciplines guides me. I hope to inspire in them a desire to be lifelong learners, forever bearing a deep consideration for the way in which their worlds are structured, their place in such systems, and their obligation to challenge and improve those systems. Our class time revolves around raising questions and engaging in conversations that elicit those kinds of considerations and prompt them to think deeply about the course content. I am pleased to report that I routinely receive notes of thanks and inquiry for resources regarding further study once the semester has ended. Recently, my work has expanded beyond undergraduates to assist PhD students and other junior faculty, for example, my coordination of the summer institute Africana DHi (https://africanadhi.com), and serving on a dissertation committee at Fordham University. Graduate students working in Black digital religion routinely make use of my work in advancing their own research in the area.
I have also found relevant ways to incorporate digital humanities into my teaching on Black religion through the use of virtual reality. With my guidance, advanced learners in my AFAS 160 A2: “African Diaspora: Religion and Culture” class created a virtual exhibit of the African spirit world through music and incorporating artifacts from Central Africa. Together, we traced the path of African sound to ongoing sacred music traditions in the Americas. The virtual space provided fertile ground for imaging religious worlds historically and presently. Student presenters and viewers alike noted the usefulness of this approach in concretizing and visualizing Black religious theories discussed earlier in the semester. This teaching experience effectively applied research on digital Black religion and methodological approaches to digital research to digital learning.
SERVICE
My service to the University of Arizona has dovetailed nicely with my research and teaching interests. My close work with students in the classroom has also served as opportunities for bringing majors and minors into to the Africana Studies Program. In addition to my active participation in service in the Africana Studies Program and the College of Humanities through my work on the Black History Month Committee and the COH Scholarship Committee, I have been engaged in service and outreach to the larger community. As a longtime performance poet and ordained minister, my engagement with the campus community and wider Tucson area has centered on bridging my scholarly and public life through outreach and service. As a Faculty Fellow in C.A.T.S. Academics, I worked to connect with students beyond the classroom through the arts. I have also led rich conversations with members of the campus community around topics such as race and artistic expression as with invited talks like the “UA Poetry Centers Shop Talk of the Work of Evie Shockley.” Such conversations have also occurred through my poetry performances for other groups like the UA Early Academic Outreach program. Beyond my service on committees, I have also been pleased to meet with alumni and potential donors on behalf of the College of Humanities (e.g., a research talk I gave in October 2018 at the “Phoenix Salon”). In the city of Tucson, I have had the rewarding experience of designing curriculum and facilitating classes in debate for African American high school students. Last year, I was able to link UArizona’s debate team with local at-risk teens to develop their communication skills and knowledge of African American history.
In 2019, I organized and facilitated a conference specifically focused on the Africana Digital Humanities Institute. The Institute drew scholars from five countries for an innovative web-based program. This process has further advanced my growing expertise in the study of digital religion and Black young adult culture. Additionally, it expanded my abilities in leadership and service, requiring administrative planning, organizing, and working with various departments and mentoring of doctoral students.
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