Conference Grants: Malika Imhotep at AAG Annual Meeting
Malika Imhotep received a Spring 2018 BCNM Conference Grant to help cover her costs attending Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers. Read more about her experience in her own words below!
With the support of the BCNM I was able to attend the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in New Orleans, Louisiana where i presented my work on the social media spread of black femme performance aesthetics as part of a roundtable entitle “Tracing Black Queer Spatialities.” It was an honor to be apart of such an engaging conversation on the ways black queer communities see themselves across space and time. My co-panelist open Watu Poe brought the black femme energy into the room with the works of Ru Paul and the black queer Brazilian cultural innovators of Batekoo. My contribution came from work I began in Abigail DeKosnik’s “Theorizing Popular Culture” Seminar during my first year on campus. It was amazing to see how much new media is apart of conversations on human geographies. This year “Black Geographies” was a special theme thanks to initiatives spearheaded by the black geographies working group.The social and technological possibilities opened up by intersectional thinking proved to be really impressive and far reaching. DJ Lynnée Denise delivered a plenary on DJ Scholarship and Sonic Liberation Methodology that was life giving and paradigm shifting! I left the conference with a renewed commitment to thinking through cartographies of black joy and black life online + irl.
