Hello and welcome to the Digital Alchemy podcast brought to you by the International Communication Association Podcast Network. My name is Moya Bailey. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and the founder of the Digital Apothecary Lab. For this episode, I've invited Dr. Beth Richie and Dr. Dana-Ain Davis to discuss what is digital alchemy and how it applies to both of their journeys as scholars and activists in the Black feminist movement. Here's Beth and Dana.
I am Beth Richie. I teach at University of Illinois-Chicago, think of myself as a Black feminist abolitionist, and have worked with INCITE!, Love and Protect, with the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project teaching at Stateville Prison and Logan Prison. All of those organizations are groups that have come together to try to make space for freedom work for criminalized survivors. So, my work is kind of at the nexus of abolition and ending gender-based violence. I met Dana because we really are in many ways on that same journey. We've come to the journey from different places, but we fundamentally share commitment to that freedom struggle for Black people, and Black women, and Black queer people, in particular. We met 35 years ago when we were both at Hunter College, City University of New York. I was in the strange position of having my first faculty job. And Dana was in somewhat of a strange position of being my student, even though it was clear I was learning from her as much, if not more, than she was learning from me. We became fast friends, political allies, sisters. Yeah, and I think sort of grown up together, in some ways. That's my version of the story. Dana, what's yours?
My version only differs in the beginning, in that I am Dana-Ain Davis. I am an anthropologist and I work at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where I run the Center for the Study of Women and Society. I have been involved in different domains around Black feminist life. I started out being really interested in how black women live policy, particularly around policy that affected women who are being battered. My focus on battered women and violence against women completely inspired, as an academic endeavor, completely inspired by Beth, although also inspired by being a survivor of sexual assault. I'm working on issues related to reproduction. And I've worked with what was called NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League. I worked with the reproductive rights eduation project at Hunter with Beth Richie, Eugenia Acuña, and oh, Rosalind Petchesky. I work with Collective Power and the National Network of Abortion Funds. And am thinking a lot about abolitionism. Also did a little bit of work with women who are incarcerated, around HIV AIDS. Everything after that is what Beth said.
Your work transcends the academy. I'm curious, too, about what that experience has been like for you, having both firmly grounded research and academic concerns as part of your work, but then also really important movement and practical life work, in terms of building the world we want. How did you get started in that and what's it feel like?
Doing work that moves across different spaces, doesn't really feel like something that was particularly intentional. It feels like it was really organic. For me, it just seemed impossible to be collecting people's life stories and not being able to utilize those life stories in a way that could be transformational around policy, around practice. And now in the work I do now, in terms of procedure. But it comes from a place of the house that I grew up in, where the work that my parents did was always about working and doing things relative to making things better for Black people.
And I like the way you use the word organic, Dana, because that's very much what it feels like to me. I can't imagine working any other way than with my academic work following my activism. And I've wondered if part of that is because I work in the area of violence and there's real lives on the line, real bodies, real people, real emergencies. So, I can't imagine working in a way that only observes, or studies, or analyzes things that are so much of a lived experience, of an emergency. Like Dana, I think it's in part, the methods that I use. It's also the topics, or the subjects, that I work on, that it would be impossible to not live in both worlds. In fact, like Dana, I think of myself as an accidental academic. But Moya, I do want to pause for a minute and say that both Dana and I have said that, but we both have academic administrative jobs and we have for a while. They're not more important to me than being accountable and authentic in the work I do at the prison, or on the hotline, or with the people coming out. And I think it made an easier way, in some ways. It made it harder too because I often feel a little almost out of place. But it also made it easier to just do those things without the same kind of stress or placing them as important things as an academic, or as a scholar, as a department head, or associate dean, or all the other things we've been. They're just less important than freedom campaign to me.
What's the best part of your work? What other aspects of your work do you love?
I like to write. Dana is amazingly prolific and every time I turn around, Dana, you've got something else you've written, some other book in some amazing area. I try to also write for an audience of people who aren't necessarily academics. I'm really finding a lot of joy in the freedom that comes from being able to write what I want to write. I'm getting a lot of joy from teaching. We're starting a program at Logan Prison, really excited about thinking about what a liberatory feminist pedagogy means, in a place that's very different than a public university in the middle of Chicago. I like to see what people can do with new ideas. Recognizing that that doesn't really happen in a semester, but especially teaching graduate students where it's a long view, like your relationship isn't just a class but it's a moment in their career, widening some roads, at this point, where I'm able to learn as much from the students both in the prisons and in the classrooms on this campus.
I am looking forward to spending a little more leisure time with people, but that is the best part of my work - spending leisure time with people but also being in community with Black feminist scholars who make me think and stretch. And I came late to like Black feminism as an academic project. But nonetheless, being in community with Black feminist scholars, whether it's one-on-one or reading. The other thing that's the best part of my work right now, as Beth said, doing things that I want to do because I don't really have to really impress anybody. The best part of my work is the ability to be in community with people that doesn't feel like work.
All three of us have had the good fortune of enjoying parts of our academic lives without the internet and the digital being so heavily part of everything. I want to know how that has shifted the way you think about your work. I am curious, what digital interventions have been helpful or hurtful? How has the digital shaped the way that you do your work?
I feel like technology has mostly not been friendly to my work. Or maybe I haven't made friends enough with technology to have a deep, meaningful relationship that serves me very well. I've thought about this a lot. It's about aging, for me. It's about working on issues where technology doesn't appear that much. People in prison don't have a lot of technology. Survivors of violence have to be very careful about using technology. So, it's not like, given me more ability to do my work in the work that I do. And that's changing. I mean, there's Zoom. There's a way to Zoom now in some prisons in very limited ways, but most people who are in prison they don't have cell phones, they don't have emails. So, I don't feel like I've embraced it in any kind of way. I just don't want to be tethered. Now, I want to just say, there's two other pieces that are a little bit connected to this. I wrote my dissertation on a typewriter. The labor that went into the actual production. And it's just a very different way to move through ideas when you have the ability to co-construct, and cut, and paste, and spellcheck, and all that. I remember when my mother retired, she worked at a public library. She was a reference librarian, and she said, "I'm stopping because they're digitizing the card catalog." And I remember she wasn't sad about it, but she just thought like the world that she had so loved, had moved on. And almost had betrayed something that she thought was so important about the process of her work. And I do sort of wonder am I going to get to a point where I say, "The world has moved on, because of some technology, and I'm not willing, able, prepared to learn what's next." I'm going to, sort of, almost surrender to a different way, a new generation, new processes of knowledge creation, and production and sharing, etc.
I have a relationship with technology. Some of it is around fear. I already don't know all of the things that my Mac can do. I can't imagine that as things become more elaborate, that I'll be able to keep up. I think the digital world has its benefits and its caveats. Then there are these complicated things about technology, which I allude to a little bit in my book, but it's like assisted reproductive technology, all the technology that's used to save - the period tracking apps that can be deployed against people around abortion and procreate all that. So, there's lots there for people to critique in terms of the application of technology. But, on the other hand, what I love about it is that, as I have wanted, at least two or three years, be more connected internationally with reproductive justice workers. I've been able to create, co-create community with people. Because of Instagram, I learned about a woman who's like the only Black midwife in Barcelona. And we've been talking. And I've met all of these people that have fostered the ability for me to have international engagement with people, which I think is part of movement building, right. So, that part I love.
This is the world we live in, where things are both and that's part of what I've been thinking about technology and also wanting to go back to some older traditions, this idea of magic. I have a quote from my work where I think about digital alchemy and I say that, "Alchemy is the science of turning regular metals into gold." And when I talk about digital alchemy, I'm thinking of the ways that Black women transform everyday digital media into valuable social justice magic. We turn scraps into something precious. It's also this delicate balance of making do and pushing for more, that informs my thinking of how Black women create transformative digital media magic. You both said that the digital is there to place a fear. But do you see the digital being used by some of the people that you work with in transformative ways? Does digital alchemy show up in terms of the communities that you work with?
For me, yeah. A lot of the people that are deploying it are younger. But, I am deeply enamored with the way doulas, and birth workers, and reproductive justice activists, and advocates comment on everything, shut stuff down, share crazy things. Like, this White nurse on TikTok where she's asking this Black woman what her pain scale is, on a scale of one to 10, and the woman says, "It's like a 20." This white nurse is saying, "But you're eating chips. So, how can you actually be in pain?" And then the information that comes out of it is so amazing. Like these doctors, Black doctors, and Black nurses are like, "Of course you're eating chips, because actually, crunchy things help reduce pain, which is why they give you chips when you're in the hospital." And then there's all of the amazing creativity. This young woman that I used to mentor, she has this podcast called "Homecoming". And it's about challenging the idea the hospital is the safest place to give birth. This other woman, Taja Lindley, has a podcast called Black Women's Department of Labor. And she's talking about labor and the labor of laboring. And it's just this beautiful set of interviews with people across disciplines, fields, and life experiences talking about various issues related to reproduction. I spend so much more time now on social media looking and learning. There are these other gems, this alchemy that you've described, is amazing. And the last thing that I'll say about it is, as my mother was transitioning, to the other realm, just before she started actively transitioning, I found this Instagram reel by this woman who had her handle as "Mom of My Mom". Her mother had early onset Alzheimer's. I learned so much about how to care. My mother did not have Alzheimer's, but just useful things about caring and being a caregiver. And there's a whole community of people who support her and are part of her life. And I would never have thought to find a community of people for support in that way.
What are you excited about in terms of where your work is going? What has you excited about even this next generation of scholars and activists that are coming after you?
Part of it is I feel like we've been through times like this before, survived them, and come out stronger. So, I have hope in the endurance, the long term, the ways that intergenerational hope can get transferred. One of the benefits of our occupation is you do get to see amazingness in young people every day. And I feel very helpful in the young abolitionist scholars who I think are really in a way that I never did, they're more integrating their critique and the building of the world they want inside the academy. So, I feel really inspired by that. I feel excited about the future, in some ways. Moving into a different role as someone who's getting older and thinking about my next work in the world, and in my family, and in my community, and with my friends. And so, I don't feel hopeless, that's for sure.
I sometimes feel hopeless, but then I forget, because something happens and I just get excited all over again. I think they're probably two things that are really exciting for me, which are the international work that's happening. I'm actually co-hosting this conference in France, with Black and Brown birth workers, but not people from France, from all over Europe. And there's this burgeoning community of Black-identified scholars doing work on race, and racism, and reproduction in Europe, which I'm just really excited about. Trying to make more connections with people on the continent, various places in Africa, and have just begun to do that. But also working with people in Brazil. So, that's exciting. The framework that I developed, the obstetric racism, has been taken up by this OB/GYN epidemiologist who turned it into a patient-reported experience measure, which is the only measure that examines Black women and birthing people's hospital-based experiences.
Any last thoughts that you have? Maybe some advice for some graduate students who are coming up? How to think about what to do, how to make sure that you're living in an organic way, with this insight outside of the academy?
I do have to say, I think that's a life that Beth and I - we didn't walk into it, we were in it. And I don't think everybody has to do the same thing. People who are doing theory and don't need to talk to nobody. It requires an openness and putting yourself in places. And in some cases, making decisions. I had to justify why I write the way I write when I went up, not for tenure, but just for reappointment in my first job. And why I was an activist. I reframed the concept of service to my own ends. The question was, "Describe the service." I just said, "Well, I have service in two areas. I have service to the university and service to my communities."
I think one of the things you and I both talked about over time is the exit ramp. We can't stay in this relationship with this university without knowing that we could go somewhere else and do something else. I think that's hard when you're a younger person and investing so much in moving on the path to more stability, finishing your degree, getting tenure, getting promoted. But, I think if you don't have the ability to imagine doing something else or finding another place where your work can live, then I think that's when the world of academia starts to close in on you. And I have always thought like, there's not only another world, there might even be, in some ways, a better place for me to do my work, in a policy organization, in a prison. I've always looked for places where it could grow, and it's not always in academia. I also think it's important to make sure that you have accountability to something other than just the people who surround you in your office. What I realized is, I have to be a teacher while I'm a student, and I have to have other people I'm accountable to because I can't be accountable only to that. In formal and informal ways, at many stages of my career, I've had alternative accountability structures. I had a group of people who read chapters of my dissertation, who were not part of the academy, as I moved along, to make sure that I was writing with a sense of authenticity to who I am. And I think it saved my soul, as well as made my work better.
I love that. That's such a beautiful note to end on. I want to thank you both for your time, the generosity of spirit in sharing this information, and for your work, because it's been an inspiration to me. So, thank you both.
Thank you, Moya. You're amazing. So, thanks for including me, and it's always a pleasure to be with you, Dana.
Thank you so much.
Digital Alchemy is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Our producer is Bennett Pack. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Matt Oakley. Please check the show notes in the episode description to learn more about me, my guests, and digital alchemy overall. Thanks so much for listening!
