A multi-modal research incubator committed to pursuing feminist research questions related to the intellectual production and social thriving of Black women and girls.
The Race and Gender Equity (RAGE Lab), founded in 2023, is a multi-modal research incubator committed to producing Black feminist research on the social thriving of Black women and girls and making that research accessible to broad public audiences. As a research and training incubator, RAGE Lab focuses on studying the variety of ways that Black feminists do their work in public. Using a mix of community conversations, digital archiving methods, oral histories of Black feminist thinkers who visit the lab, and textual analysis of Black feminist online knowledge production, researchers in the lab work to ascertain a comprehensive view of the conditions that shape contemporary Black feminist knowledge production.
RAGE Lab's Founding Director and Principal Investigator is Dr. Brittney Cooper, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers-New Brunswick.
Her research includes Black Women’s Intellectual History, Black Feminist Thought, Hip Hop Feminisms, Hip Hop Studies, Race and Gender Representation in Popular Culture, Digital Feminisms, and New Media.
What does Black feminism look like in public? Plait/Form, the inaugural Black Feminist Public Works Incubator offered by the Race and Gender Equity (RAGE) Lab at Rutgers University supports writers, academics, and content creators who are seeking to answer this question by doing Black feminist work in creative and publicly accessible ways. Much like the nightly plaiting practice that has shaped so much of Black communal intimacies, as Black women and girls got their hair cared for in preparation for the next day of school or work, Plait/Form offers space to intentionally bring together the strands of thinking, teaching, and creating that anchor Black feminist public life, and to think about the forms that such braiding together of ideas might take.
This two-day intensive session will include master classes with Black feminist public scholars and thinkers, opportunities to meet agents, editors, and philanthropists, and group-based executive coaching designed to help you move your project to the next stage of implementation. At the end of the workshop, you will complete an implementation plan and present it to the group.
Please visit this page for more details, to be announced soon.
The Rutgers Race and Gender Equity (R.A.G.E.) Lab launchec its first signature initiative, “Black Feminism in the Public Sphere,” with a special event entitled “Doing Black Feminism in Public,” a conversation with Dr. Brittney Cooper, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies and Principal Investigator of RAGE Lab and Dr. Roxane Gay, author of the New York Times bestselling books Bad Feminist and Hunger, and the current Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, on September 13, 2023.
Black Feminism in the Public Sphere Initiative is the recipient of generous financial and in-kind support from the Mellon Foundation, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Ford Foundation, the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers, the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, the Rutgers Office of Research, and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
ISGRJ Teaching and Research Labs are versatile, humanistic, interdisciplinary incubators producing collaborative, multi-genre, cutting-edge research on race. Serving as multi-modal spaces, scholars, students and faculty investigators pair arts, humanities, and cultural studies research methods with social and behavioral science and stem approaches. Each lab aims to contribute innovative research and pedagogy that can lead to the disruption and transformation of racial formations of the human.
The Black Ecologies Signature Lab at the ISGRJ draws together threads in order to generate scholarship, artistry, and other resources that aid in infusing public and scholarly discourse as well as our broader cultural imaginaries with the insights generated through the analytical insights, methods, and theories related to Black Ecologies and its closely allied fields, including Black Geographies. The lab provides a suite of digital projects, speaker series and workshops, community engagement events, teaching and undergraduate program development, and publications to foment Rutgers as a major center for Black ecological studies for faculty, students, and community.
This new humanities-centered lab proposes the Cybercene as a new gathering principal to study the current ecocultural era in our planetary history. As lands burn, oceans boil, species go extinct almost unnoticed on a daily basis and political/economic/cultural conflicts (local, regional and global) multiply, we aim to explore interdisciplinary yet realistic pathways towards healing and restored habitability. The Cybercene Lab's Founding Director and Principal Investigator is Dr. Vetri Nathan, Mellon Associate Professor of Global Racial Justice and Italian at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
