Grace Gipson at Black Imagine Oakland
Grace Gipson presented at the Black Speculative Arts Movement--Black Imagine Oakland conference at California State University East Bay on May 13th, 2017.
Grace discussed her research/dissertation project, which seeks to further interrogate the creation/formation of a Black female superhero identity within comics and graphic novels through such topics as, African queer love, disability as empowering, coloring utopias/dystopias, promoting Black Girl Magic in STEM, and creating a new media legacy for Black female voices. Examining various black female superheroine stories offers an opportunity to (re)explore new identities and territories in comics, reframe our understanding of certain terminology and concepts, and most notably to empower the black female voice.
Ms. Grace Gipson is a doctoral candidate in the African American Studies program with a designated emphasis in New Media at the University of California Berkeley. Grace’s area of research interests center on various representations of race and gender within digital humanities and black popular culture specifically comic books & graphic novels, Afrofuturism and comic books, and race and new media. Additionally, throughout her academic career, Grace has published various articles and book chapters, and has been featured in Huffington Post and NPR.org. In her spare time, Grace is one fourth of the #BlackComicsChat twitter podcast crew, a regular contributor for the website Black Girl Nerds, as well as the Social Media Manager for The Berkeley Graduate.