Designed to eliminate barriers to accessing food and grounded in dignity, autonomy, and respect. We don’t require identification, registration, or pre-approval of any kind.

Reading: Siblings of the Yam
Week 5: Where is the Love?: Practicing an Ethics of Care

How can we shift our ideas of care from an individual chore to a collective responsibility? What does it mean to love oneself in a deeply anti-black, ableist, capitalist, sexist, colonial (the list goes on) world?

This week is about love as a theory of justice and care as its form of practice. We’ll ask: How can black feminist love-politics and an ethics of care shape and structure our movements? Who typically gets access to care and who is expected to perform care labor? How have Black disabled and queer/trans folks kept entire communities alive?

Through these questions, we’ll create a working theory of love and care together, and, in the process, concoct softer, more responsible forms of solidarity and connection. 

Training focused on building community-based emergency response skills. Participants are equipped with practical skills to intervene during bleeding emergencies.

Reading: Siblings of the Yam
Week 6: Thinking Space 1: Collective Art Project

When making a painting, artists step back to see the full picture and when making a film, filmmakers watch their drafts to see how the story flows together. They do this so they don’t get lost in the details—so they can “see the forest for the trees.” But rarely do we get the opportunity to do so when it comes to learning. What are we learning? What’s the bigger picture?

This thinking space, we’ll collectively reflect on the process of learning thus far and do a fun art project (TBD) as part of our meditations!

Reading: Siblings of the Yam
Week 7: Black Madness, Mad Blackness

This week takes up madness as a crucial site of black feminist thought and political possibility. We’ll ask: What does it mean to account for madness in our understanding of Black life? How might social movements gain depth, honesty, and power by foregrounding experiences of emotional overwhelm, spiritual rupture, and rage?

Rather than framing madness solely through language like “mental illness” or “disorder,” we will explore how activists and scholars have reclaimed madness as an expansive term that holds insanity, cognitive disability, neurodivergence, and anger together. In this framing, madness becomes not something to be treated, but something that names the psychic and emotional impacts of racial capitalism, colonial violence, and ongoing societal neglect. This session asks how Black madness might function as critique, refusal, and even generative knowledge—and what it demands of our movements, our communities, and our practices of care.

Reading: Siblings of the Yam
Week 8: Black Feminisms/Transnational Feminisms

June Jordan was a powerful voice of liberation in the civil rights, feminism, antiwar, and gay and lesbian rights movements. A Caribbean-American bisexual poet, activist, and educator, her deep commitment to solidarity amongst Third World and racialized peoples was an essential part of her black feminist politics. She was adamantly anti-Zionist (so much so that she was excluded from many activist circles) and made linkages across Nicaragua, South Africa, Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, and more. 

This week, we take a deep dive into her poetry and prose to explore the relationship between black and transnational feminisms. Thinking alongside Jordan, we will consider how oppressions around the world depend on each other without silencing specific situations. We’ll explore our responsibility to see beyond borders and to hold firm to the interconnected struggle against global state terror.

Reading: Siblings of the Yam
Week 9: From Ungendering to Gender Abolition

Black feminism has persistently challenged us to consider the limitations of the gender binary and urged us to consider the strained relationship Black women have with “womanhood.” From the objectification of the Middle Passage to the present-day state violence, this week’s meeting discusses the deeply embedded grammars that tie womanhood with white femininity, viewing Black women as “not-quite-women.” 

We’ll ask whether we should be invested in womanhood (and gender, more broadly) in the first place? Why do we and when should we hold on to the categories “woman” or “man?” Through these questions, we’ll turn to the abolition of gender as a potential goal of a radical, black/trans/queer feminism. We will ask what exactly gender abolition entails and whether it can lead to a more inclusive form of feminist politics, a more robust vision of reproductive justice, and, perhaps, a freer way of seeing ourselves and each other. 

Reading: Siblings of the Yam
Week 10: Afro-Diasporic Spiritualities: Beyond Colonial Genders, Beyond the Colonial “Self”

Western ideas of personhood often center the individual as independent—values that shape how we understand identity, authenticity, and even liberation. But, Black people have always created other ways of existence. This final week turns to Afro-diasporic spiritual traditions to consider alternative understandings of the self, relationality, and the sacred.

Engaging practices such as Surinamese Winti and Haitian Vodou, we will explore how Afro-Atlantic spiritual systems complicate colonial ideas by emphasizing interdependence, ancestral presence, and open boundaries between the spiritual and material worlds. What might they teach us about survival and freedom beyond colonial frameworks of the self? We will close the study group by reflecting on how spiritual knowledge can inform black feminist practices, world-building, and everyday life.

Reading: Siblings of the Yam
Week 11: Thinking Space 2: Manifesto Writing Workshop

Our closing week asks us to reflect on what we’ve learned about Black feminism and its spirit. With our learning community, we will work on manifestos—artist or organizational statements, zines, leaflets mobilizing for a big rally, newspaper announcements championing a particular cause, or whatever medium will help you express your vision for the world. We will carefully consider our own identities and our perspectives on black feminism, using the themes of the previous weeks to articulate intentions related to social change, perspectives on social structures, or ideas for calls to action. 

Come to exchange ideas with each other, ask questions, and run wild toward your vision of a black feminist world.