Understanding “all policy is health policy,” this dissertation explores Black people’s healing and wellbeing with an abolition mindset. Through the lens of arts and culture in public health, the title denotes a pursuit of “healthful narratives” with ethical storytelling, creating, and performing that is conducive to good health. It manifests as public health dreaming in the midst of COVID-19 and state-sanctioned violence resulting from colonialism and racial capitalism—which contribute to racial hierarchies and millions of cross-generational deaths. This mixed-methods study contemplates the future of health promotion with concern for honoring Black creativity’s role in population health, and reckons with racial capitalism as foundational to health inequities and preventable, premature death. The study asks 1) What socio-cultural pathways do or can exist for theatrical and performance productions for health promotion? 2) In the face of racial, gendered capitalism, how does creativity manifest for Black women and/or gender-expansive people when creating or performing art and cultural work related to health promotion goals? Merging arts and culture into traditional public health infrastructure further exacerbates anti-Black harm, because it risks history repeating itself as our contemporary reality. As practice-based evidence, my Black Feminist Performance Auto/ethnography is research-engaged theatre, accompanied by learnings from research partners practicing contemplative arts-based research methodology. The findings are GriefLove, co-conceived with Des Bennett (director and dramaturg), and a narrative analysis of collage-based health mosaics and definitions of healthful narratives as forecasts of community-driven public health dreaming. The final chapter presents three socio-cultural pathways: “Black Embodiment,” “The Aesthetics of Health,” and “Futurity.” In the spirit of healthful narratives, it closes with a letter to Black Public Health Creatives and Cultural Workers in service of cultural and health equity—markers of “Good Health.”

In May of 2021, in a move unprecedented in European history, the governments of Germany and Namibia announced the completion of their negotiations for funding to redress what they together have termed the "wounds" of the colonial past. The bilateral agreement had long been declared void by Namibians of diverse backgrounds, however, who protested that the way they have been treated pales in comparison to the kind of treatment that Jewish people of various communities have received from Germany since 1945. My ethnographic research followed the diversity of discourse about German colonialism in two years leading up to this agreement in multiple locations; from hearings concerning legal demands for the return of Herero and Nama indigenous land, bones, and cattle in New York City, to political struggles around race and racism in Berlin, to the intransigent settler work of German Lutheran landowners in Namibia. I explore this ethnographic and historical material in a thesis that has three distinct sections. In the first part, I look at the place of the idea of Germany in these ongoing struggles by turning to the German Namibian community and the networks that they operate in and through. I ask after the borders of Germany as an idea, as a territory, and as a political theology – and I look to what "German Namibia" can tell us about contemporary German politics more broadly – most specifically as a site to undertake a potential genealogy of German Protestant Liberalism and its various phantasms. In the second part, I look to the history of Holocaust reparations and its relationship to the Herero and Nama case in the New York courtroom to understand how historically specific iterations of the figure of the suffering Jew have come to contour various grammars in which repair for anti-Black violence and native dispossession are fought for and responded to, especially when figured through the juridical language of reparations. In the third part, I turn towards the contemporary German politics of acknowledgment, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the process of coming to terms with the past. Rather than asking here after the lack of attention to colonial history on the part of the German state, I ask after how the state has actively tried to oppose colonial racism by integrating the history of colonialism into its memory politics. I look to the multiple paradoxes of this attempt that I argue ultimately leads to a reinscription of German white supremacy upon racialized bodies. Overall, my research turns to the past and present of German settler colonialism to explore the politics of reparation on an international scale alongside the relationship between race, religion, and repair in a fractured Europe.

Studying resident repurposing permits an understanding of urban planning that foregrounds the power of residents to shape the production of space. This dissertation is an extended case study of resident-initiated planning alternatives in the former ‘Bantustan’ capital city of Mmabatho (present-day Mahikeng), today a South African secondary city. Apartheid officials planned Mahikeng through racial-modernist principles of ‘separate development’ as a receiving site of forced relocation and racialized dispossession of Black South Africans. Historical and archival research, semi-structured interviews, and personal communications with planners, public officials, activists, and residents uncover the historical roots of repurposing in apartheid-era contestation to planning marked by elite profit and graft. Through in situ analyses of 80+ built sites, 60+ of which have been repurposed, I propose specific types of repurposing in Mahikeng: official and unofficial land-use changes; symbolic and aesthetic innovations; ephemeral or pop-up activations; and institutional reformulations of former ‘Bantustan’ buildings. Case studies of select built sites—and case studies of select local neighborhoods and their experiences of political-geographic change—enable me to propose that repurposing has proceeded in a dynamic cycle that includes contestation, destruction, and (re)invention. Various “key ingredients” enable repurposings to be successful, including actors, tactics, and institutional arrangements. To explain why residents repurpose, I consider actors’ motivations and find that repurposing is driven by wide-ranging and varied autonomous interests, including economic survival, human dignity, and meaning-making. The consequences of repurposing are profound: it helps meet residents’ basic needs and gestures toward an alternative planning imaginary in the city, one marked by an incremental vernacular approach to planning. This study raises critical questions broadly relevant to planning and urban policy, including: how do afterlives of racial domination affect the production of space, viewed through residents’ repurposing? How do repurposing and vernacular planning unfold in different local geographic and sociopolitical contexts? How should urban policy account for residents’ self-initiated city-making? And what roles should self-initiated city-makers (repurposers) play in shaping planning and urban policy? While the conceptual label of repurposing may echo globally, distinctive to Mahikeng is how contemporary repurposing is historically and institutionally grounded in solidarity: contestation to apartheid planning.

This narrative inquiry study explored the lived experiences of five Black male music educators in the New York Metropolitan area. The purpose of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of how Black male music educators theorized Blackness, disrupted anti-Blackness, and cultivated Black Joy within predominantly White K-12 learning spaces.This study sought to provide Black male music educators space to narratively display their genius, restore their humanity, and celebrate their Blackness and Black Joy. The researcher conducted two semi-structured interviews with each participant, focused on their identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy. This study used Abolitionist Pedagogy, Gholdy Muhammad’s Culturally and Historically Responsive Education Model, and Black Critical Theory frameworks as lenses to interpret the lived experiences. This study took place in two phases over four months, beginning October 2023 through January 2024. The participants’ responses to the interview questions helped generate the findings, narratives, and themes of their lived experiences within predominantly White K-12 learning spaces. The Black Male music educators in this study offered several ways on how they celebrate their Blackness and Black Joy, in the face of anti-Black sentiment. Their daily presence in their learning spaces, despite being the only Black male in some instances, was a conscious act of defying the inherent structures created to keep them out. Their overflowing expressions of Black Joy through family, faith, culture, and strength created learning spaces that support intersectional justice and uplifts the humanity of others.

Research demonstrates that Black students deserve teachers who utilize culturallyresponsive pedagogy (CRP) and antiracist pedagogy to offer a high-quality education that is both engaging and affirming of their culture and life experiences. Unfortunately, many Black students are instead forced to navigate schools that do not center their culture or ways of knowing, but rather perpetuate the racism embedded within the U.S. education system. In suburban schools in particular, Black students rarely have access to teachers who represent their racial and cultural backgrounds, and this lack of representation and understanding amplifies the need for CRP and antiracist pedagogy. Further, existing research shows that preservice and current teachers rarely have access to the training and staff development that would prepare them to utilize these pedagogies (Warren, 2018). To offer the field more understanding about how teachers become culturally responsive and antiracist, this study explores the process that suburban public school teachers progress through to adopt these pedagogies, and the factors that inform this process. This study is informed by a theoretical framework that includes critical race theory, BlackCrit, and sociocultural context, and builds on the existing scholarship on Black students’ schooling experiences, teacher-student relationships, and CRP and antiracist pedagogy. Drawing on this existing research, I utilized qualitative data to explore suburban teachers’ perspectives, experiences and sense-making related to the process of becoming culturally responsive and/or antiracist. I conducted one-on-one interviews with 15 teachers who represent different racial/ethnic backgrounds, as well as a range of grade levels (K-12) and academic subjects. The participants all self-identify as educators who are committed to becoming culturally relevant and/or antiracist educators. They currently teach, or previously worked directly with, Black students in public suburban schools in the NYC metro area. The data from this study yielded three major takeaways. First, I found that the process of becoming a teacher who embodies culturally responsive and antiracist pedagogies is a journey that is informed by several factors, including lived experiences, key people that influence growth, and exploration of one’s own racial identity. To offer a clear illustration of how teachers progress through this process, I map the journey by offering specific details about the perspectives and practices that align with the beginning, middle and advanced phases of the journey. Importantly, this journey is nonlinear and unending, as being culturally responsive and antiracist requires continual learning and growth. Second, I find that strong teacher-relationships based in care play a key role in my participants’ journeys to adopting culturally responsive and antiracist pedagogies. I also find that teachers utilize unique approaches when demonstrating care and building relationships with Black students, as the teachers understood that Black students have unique experiences in school settings, especially those in suburban contexts. Further, I found that several factors inform teachers’ relationship-building approaches, with personal experiences and relationships being the most impactful. Importantly, I also find that when teachers work to build strong teacher-student relationships while also progressing through their journeys to adopting CRP and antiracist pedagogy, the relationships and pedagogies reinforce one another. The last key finding from this study explores the barriers that teachers encounter in their journeys to adopting culturally responsive and antiracist pedagogies. While the data demonstrated that several participants have successfully progressed through the journey to the point where they can now effectively implement CRP and antiracist pedagogy, I found that participants also faced two major barriers that impede their ability to effectively implement these pedagogies within their school contexts. The first barrier is the lack of focus on CRP and antiracist pedagogy in both teacher education and professional development sessions, including a lack of focus on the connection between student-teacher relationships and these pedagogies. The suburban contexts that the participants work within pose a second barrier, as the environments are rarely welcoming or conducive to work intended to advance racial equity. This study’s findings point to several implications for the field, including a need for changes to policy and practice, as shifting our schools toward becoming culturally responsive and antiracist requires significant support and resources. The findings also point to several opportunities for future research to further build the field’s knowledge about preparing teachers for CRP and antiracist pedagogy. Once our field knows more about this process, research such as this will help to better prepare teachers to offer Black students a high-quality education.

Advances in technologies of voice profiling shed new light on questions of listening and its entanglement with antiblackness as a structuring paradigm of modernity. To contest current conceptions of listening with regards to the question of race and antiblackness while also shining light on the potentials offered by blackness, this dissertation engages listening at three distinct sites that are entangled with this modern question of voice profiling AI. In the process, this dissertation elaborates on the ethical stakes involved in listening itself. Chapter 1 excavates the way in which the ears of enslaved Black lives were ritualized. It centers an analysis of the role of the punishment of ear cropping and how this performed both a claim over slaves’ belonging and an inhibition on their freedom. Scholarship from Hebrew law aids in uncovering the meaning of the specific form of punishment. The chapter concludes by comparing the conception of slaves’ ears to Black artistic expressions such as Harriet Jacobs’s various methods of narration in Incidents of a Slave Girl and Blind Tom Wiggins’ unique use of clusters and graphic notation in Battle of Manassas, so as to demonstrate their methods of resistance and refusal to a claimed all-encompassing regime of listening. Chapter 2 engages modern notions of sound and listening. The way in which sound is theorized and engaged in modern digital technologies is entangled with the conception of what listening is and what it entails. Hermann von Helmholtz provides an axis after which sound and listening, as well as the relation between an inner world of perceptions and an outer world of sensations, has to be engaged as a question of listening as entangled in societal questions. The chapter critically elaborates alongside questions of categorical distinction in sound, such as the use of skull shapes as referents for AI listening, instrument classification systems, and the general question of the form of sound, or sound as object. The concluding Chapter 3 discusses, alongside Sylvia Wynter’s work and Roscoe Mitchell’s piece S II Examples (date) the kinds of questions we must pose in the development of modern AI listening technologies to move past antiblackness. Immanuel Kant’s theorizing of race and his influence on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s classification of skulls relate tomodern voice profiling AI technology directly through the question of using cranial shapes. Wynter’s work challenges both a turn to varieties that do not allow the addressing of structural antiblackness, and a continuation of claims to proper knowledge on the basis of antiblackness. Ultimately, Wynter aids us in hearing Mitchell’s continual shapeshifting practice on the saxophone as a proposal towards a refiguring of our conception of sound, listening, and us.