About the lecture

This talk considers what it means to be fed and how to move from collaborative work agreements to community through the care required to see colleagues and students in the fullness of their humanity. I turn to examples from the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program and Psyche Williams-Forson’s work “Where Did They Eat? Where Did They Stay? Interpreting Material Culture of Black Women’s Domesticity in the Context of the Colored Conventions” to consider how Black organizations often through the invisible labor of Black women intentionally attend to the physical, social and emotional needs of their community. This talk traces linkages between our practice of caretaking through the provision of actual food with the practice of seeing and crafting a community where the whole of the individual was taken into account in our research and teaching. 
 

About the speaker

Catherine Knight Steele is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Maryland - College Park and the founding director of the African American Digital Humanities Initiative. She now directs the Black Communication and Technology lab as a part of the Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, & Optimism Network.
 
Her research focuses on race, gender and media with a specific emphasis on African American culture and discourse in traditional and new media. She examines representations of marginalized communities in the media and how groups resist oppression and practice joy using online technology to create spaces of community.
 
Catherine’s research has been published in such journals as Social Media + Society, Information, Communication and Society, and Feminist Media Studies. Her book Digital Black Feminism examines the relationship between Black women and technology as a centuries-long gendered and racial project in the U.S.