Digital Daughters: Black Girls Bridging the Divide - Submit by July 6
Sisterhood Summit 2013
Call for Submissions
The Black Girl Project (BGP) is holding its third annual Sisterhood Summit, a symposium designed to provide a platform for young women and girls to develop the tools to advocate, express, create and inspire, while also building active and sustainable networks on local, national and global levels, in Brooklyn, NY in October, 2013. The symposium this year is themed: Digital Daughters: Black Girls Bridging the Divide.
“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” - Audre Lorde
This year’s summit, is inspired by the reality that Black women and girls* are online and claiming virtual space for themselves! From Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and every “app” we are using AND creating, we are continuing to push and explore deeper themes of safety, expression, sexuality, love, and identity. The summit is an opportunity for young women and girls to engage in dialogue and interactive workshops that will allow them to ask questions, engage viewpoints, and deepen their insight.
As Black women and girls create history, leaving a legacy of virtual archives, narratives, images, stories, and artifacts, how are we building community with one another and what have we learned along the way? These are some of the questions we’ll be discussing and attempting to find answers to among one another. We are also interested in conversations about online safety, from bullying, identity theft, and accessibility; how do Black women and girls decide what information online is valuable and factual; how has language and communication evolved for Black women and girls; who is still excluded or isolated and how can we make changes to include more fully those members of our communities?
This year we welcome parents and caregivers of the young women and girls to be present. There will be a parent track of workshops and tools to support and help facilitate conversations around online safety, new cyber laws, sex/uality, values, and popular culture by those people who work with youth on a regular basis, and even by youth workers themselves!
We believe at BGP that it is always important to provide a space for a variety of perspectives to engage, grow, and that through the collective sharing of knowledge, telling of our stories, and standing in solidarity with one another that we are able to enrich, broaden, and transform ourselves and our communities.
We are seeking submissions for Digital Daughters: Black Girls Bridging the Divide around the following core pathways:
media making 101
introduction to using platforms and frameworks
sex and representation in media, film, literature, and/or history
consent online and offline
laws regarding virtual spaces
power and the virtual community
creating a virtual voice
online activism
healing from trauma, heartbreak, online
human rights
anonymity, usernames, and pseudonyms
language online
sexting
anti-bullying and building networks of solidarity
online and virtual representations of sex/uality
citations and attribution of online ideas/images/voices
accountability and responsibility online
innovation online
sexual orientation and queerness online
accessibility
people with disabilities and virtual spaces/access
copyright, creative commons, and ownership
Additionally, this year, we will have a section of the summit dedicated solely to parents and other adult caretakers.
Questions to consider when preparing your submission:
-What does it mean for us to have an online presence?
-What are forms of healing from trauma?
-How do we build solidarity virtually/online with communities that are oppressed?
-What are essential things to know about being online?
-What does intimacy look and feel like online?
-Are there forms of pleasure that may be experienced online?
-What safety and security themes are important to know and be clear on while online?
-What are ways we can build virtual and 3D spaces of support?
-How do we create media representations that are realistic and represent our experiences?
-What are ways we can learn to deconstruct the messages we are sent regarding our gender, race, class, and location online?
These submissions can be in the form of presentations, performances, screenings, workshops, panel discussions, and/or interactive installations to name a few.
Submissions should include a 250 word abstract, a resume, accompanying portfolio (if applicable), and a letter of support from a mentor if you are 18 or younger. Application materials should be submitted to this link by July, 6 2013. We encourage applicants abroad to apply as at this year’s conference, we would like to provide an intercultural videoconferencing exchange.
"You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."
—James Baldwin (via ladyvenoms)
Women Who Write 2013 International Poetry & Short Prose Contest
DEADLINE: June 30, 2013
Contest Rules
- Open to women 18 years or older.
- Women Who Write will retain one-time publication rights (print and electronic), after which all rights revert to the author.
- Entries to the contest must be previously unpublished.
"And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about."
—Haruki Murakami (via hellanne)
edifict asked: Hi - gorgeous piece on Gawker this weekend. I graduated from Emma in '08 and am grateful for the mothering it gave me, without which I would not be nearly so whole.
Thank you so much for this. Love meeting fellow Emma grads. I actually was just writing about some of the nurturing I got at Emma - it’s where I learned proper etiquette, even when I felt awkward (“Wait…different forks for the entree and the salad?”) So I totally hear you.
"In The Orphaned Adult, Rabbi Marc D. Angel writes that adult orphans become the keeper of familial memories. We are the last ones standing. What I remembered most for years about my mother was that she had not been mother at all in any pragmatic way, and all of her support had been emotional. Her talent for hyperbole was the reason that I, even today, have a filter for praise. “Everything you touch turns to gold!” she often said. “You are beautiful. I love you. I’m so proud you belong to me."
"Guernica: Do you feel like you get less attention from a literary press that is still, in some ways, pretty white?
Lynn Nottage: It’s not that I get less attention, but I get different attention. I’m still figuring this out, but I think there’s a way the press writes about our work that marginalizes it. It’s not focused on how the work speaks universally, but on me as an African-American writer. As if that’s the center of what my work is. I feel like that’s reductionist. They don’t ask Neil LaBute to talk about his whiteness, about how being a white man affects his writing. It is implicit. They ask him craft questions. They ask about the work itself.
"
—History of Omission, Dwyer Murphy interviews Lynn Nottage - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics
"The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."
—Ted Hughes on Our Universal Inner Child, in a Beautiful Letter to His Son | Brain Pickings
"Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia."
—
Kurt Vonnegut
(via calmeetvolupte)
"A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway."
—Junot Diaz (via livelearnandpanic)
"Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart."
—Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (via pavorst)
"We are not publishing our journals, or imagining ourselves to be so important that people are actually interested in the details of our lives. No. We are taking those details and lining them up, amazed, astonished, rapt the way a child might be, building blocks to form a tower. We are attempting to make sense out of what we can — to reach out a hand to the reader across a rough sea of isolation and separateness and offer up something that has shape, integrity, even beauty and symmetry. Just like life? Hardly. But that isn’t our job. ~ Dani Shapiro, On Memoir"
—Meditating on Memoir: My Beloved World, Traveling Heavy and Men We Reaped | Big Book Lover
The Electric Typewriter: 10 Excellent Essays
tetw:
As Chosen by Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay, author, essayist, editor (at Pank, The Rumpus and Bluestem), and professor, has picked 10 of her favourite essays for us. As she rightly says, “their excellence speaks for itself”:
(Source: tetw)
