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? On May 30th, the Race and Gender Equity (RAGE) Lab launched its inaugural Black Feminist Public Works Incubator, Plait/Form, with the generous support of the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Ms. Foundation for Women. Plait/Form, an intensive summer workshop curated by its Founder and Principal Investigator, Dr. Brittney Cooper, supported the development of public-facing projects by a dynamic cadre of writers, academics, and content creators hailing from locales as far as Colorado, Mississippi, Chicago, and Seattle.
Much like the nightly plaiting practice that has shaped so much of Black communal intimacies, including Black women and girls’ hair care traditions, Plait/Form offered space to intentionally bring together the strands of thinking, teaching, and creating that anchor Black feminist public life. The incubator likewise provided a meeting place for reflecting on the forms that such braiding together of ideas might take.
Over the course of three days, the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department welcomed this cohort to its Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Building to build relationships grounded in a feminist ethic of care, to be mentored by scholars and professionals working across academic, media, and publishing institutions, and to infuse their own work with a Black feminist politic. The program began sensorially with a team-building, candle-making exercise followed by introductory remarks by Plait/Form’s executive coaches, Dr. Takiyah Amin and Dr. Monica Coleman. Drs. Amin and Coleman, renowned for their award-winning work as scholars and consultants, worked closely with participants throughout the program to fine-tune project proposals, including books, podcasts, and Afro-futuristic third spaces, that respond to the question "What does Black feminism look like in public?"
Dr. Brittney Cooper presided over the three-day gathering with radical intentionality. She embodied a Black feminist orientation that demonstrated expertise in "gathering" as a mode of relation as well as a pathway to incisive and responsive knowledge production. With the support of graduate students Sarah-Anne Gresham, David Carré, K Anderson, and Brittney Marshall, Dr. Cooper cultivated a space rich in generative dialogue.
On the second and most intense day of the program, participants engaged with keynote speaker, Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, whose conversation with Dr. Cooper was attuned to the vicissitudes of our contemporary political moment. As one of the first Black women academics in the United States to make inroads into a career as a media personality, previously hosting the eponymous Melissa Harris-Perry weekend news show on MSNBC, she shared moving insights into the promises and pitfalls of a "media turn" for Black feminist scholars and creatives.
Participants with designs on trade publishing also had an opportunity to engage with Tanya McKinnon and Jamia Wilson at McKinnon Literary and Random House respectively and learned key strategies for not only developing an attractive manuscript but also procuring the support of a literary agent. Jouelzy, public historian and curator of the Smart Brown Girls Book Club and Shawnda Chapman, Director of Innovative Grantmaking and Research at the Ms. Foundation, concluded the day's mentoring sessions with invaluable practical advice on mediating the algorithmic demands of our increasingly technologized world and procuring the resources to support projects and the platforms on which they intend to be hosted.
The summer intensive concluded on Saturday, June 1st, with a participant-led presentations session that included multi-modal, genre-defying, and spatially transformative Black feminist projects. This day was made all the more meaningful with participants having the opportunity to share feedback and resources with their peers, supplemented by final reflections from Drs. Cooper, Amin, and Coleman. To the contrary, June 1st did not mark the end of RAGE Lab's engagement with this year's Plait/Form cohort. Rather, it signaled the beginning of a mutually enriching and innovative relationship with an incredible group of Black feminist scholars who are making waves to transform our perceptions of groundbreaking public-facing work.
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. Led by its co-convenors, Dr. J.T. Roane (Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice, Africana Studies and Geography, at Rutgers University-New Brunswick) and Dr. Teona Williams (Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography), 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.
