Black Neurodiversity Studies will address an emerging area of inquiry at the intersection of Black (feminist) studies, critical autism and ADHD studies, and broader critical neurodiversity scholarship. While existing work has challenged pathologizing views of neurodiversity, Blackness has often been incorporated into these conversations primarily in a way that is merely descriptive and additive. In contrast, we treat Blackness as a central site of theoretical intervention.

This special issue develops Black Neurodiversity Studies as a field of inquiry while centering autism—both self-realized and medically diagnosed—as the specific site of analysis. We understand autism as being imbricated within broader neurocognitive differences such as ADHD, learning disabilities, and mental illness. In centering autism, we identify one specific entry point into Black Neurodiversity Studies while acknowledging that it is not exhaustive. We highlight the specific lived experience of autistic Black people as a spectrum of infinite promise. In doing so, we reveal a central paradox: while autism is an essential aspect of Black life and experience, there has been a relative lack of named attention to it as a framework within Black (feminist) studies. At the same time, these fields have historically concerned themselves with many of the topics germane to autism on a conceptual level—including addressing the limits and artificiality of “Normal” and recognizing the inherent value of difference. Black Neurodiversity Studies aims to bridge the conceptual strengths of Black (feminist) studies in situating the perpetual “Other” within discursive language and theory in ways that directly center the lived experiences and theoretical insights of autistic Black people.

We understand autism as a socially mediated phenomenon through which perception becomes both material and felt. When using an autistic lens to approach Blackness, which white supremacist ideology has positioned as socially and culturally divergent, autistic Blackness emerges as a site of both layered (il)legibility and immense possibility. In this regard, the field works in critical conversation with Black feminisms, Black queer studies, and Black trans studies, drawing on their longstanding attention to identity, embodiment, and the limits of normativity while extending these insights into the explicit realm of neurocognitive difference.

Lines of inquiry may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• How might neuronormativity and neurotypicality be theorized as socially constructed categories that intersect with broader anti-Blackness?
• What does autistic Black life look and feel like? How does it function as a mode of being?
• How do Black gender identity and embodiment interact with the experience of autism?
• What discourses shape the construction of Black neurodiversity within larger societal structures (e.g., education, mass media, health and government)?
• How do Black cultural texts—literary, visual, or speculative—produce alternative frameworks for understanding autism as a mode of being rather than a site of deficit?
• How can autistic Black people across the lifespan—especially children and late-realized adults—be supported and reimagined through a Black Neurodiversity framework?

We wish to encourage submissions from across the Black diaspora and from scholars, artists, and practitioners working within, between, and beyond disciplinary boundaries. We welcome submissions from a variety of fields, including Africana Studies, literary and cultural studies, gender studies, history, disability studies, education, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and related fields.

Guest Editors
Danielle Procope Bell, dprocopebell@utk.edu
Aris Clemons, aclemon8@utk.edu

Complete submissions must be submitted to TBS’s landing page on Taylor & Francis’s website by February 15, 2027. Manuscripts should range from 4,500 to 6,000 words (inclusive of
endnotes). Before submission, authors must review the journal mandate and guidelines, ensure proper formatting, and secure permissions to use third-party materials. Submissions that do not follow the guidelines will be returned and/or delayed. Black Neurodiversity Studies will be published in the Winter 2028 issue (58.1).

*For questions regarding TBS’s guidelines, permissions for third-party material, or deadlines, please contact the managing editor, Shannon Hanks-Mackey, at hanks@theblackscholar.org

This is a repost from Robin D. G. Kelley’s Substack.

In Support of Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, by Robin D. G. Kelley

Most academics in the U.S., as well as activists resisting the genocide in Gaza, are familiar with the case of Professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, a renowned Global Studies scholar at the University of California, Irvine. On May 15, 2024, Nakba Day, she put her body on the line to protect students from riot police who had stormed their Palestine solidarity encampment. The UCI Chancellor Howard Gillman called the police on campus to dismantle the encampment. Three cops pushed Tiffany onto the concrete, causing her serious physical injury and emotional harm. She was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and held for about 24 hours in a county detention facility. Seeing that there really was no case here, the Orange County District Attorney ultimately dropped all criminal charges against Professor Willoughby-Herard and sealed her arrest.

Nevertheless, she was subjected to vicious public attacks by the group Accuracy in Media, which formed a fake organization called UC Irvine Hates Jews. She endured rape and death threats, doxxing, and a billboard truck driving around campus displaying her picture alongside a caption labeling her one of “UC-Irvine’s Leading Antisemites.” The university administration not only allowed the billboard truck free rein but did nothing to protect Professor Willoughby-Herard, one of its most distinguished faculty members. Instead, the university brought her up on charges of violating the faculty code of conduct.

What does that mean? A committee appointed by UCI’s academic senate had to decide if Professor Willoughby-Herard had, among other things, intentionally disrupted university authorized functions or activities, incited others to disobey university rules, forcibly detained or threatened to physically harm another member of the university community, or engaged in abusive and/or unethical conduct. The charges were ridiculous. Still, they handed down a split decision: two members of the three-person committee found her guilty of some charges and recommended a one quarter unpaid suspension and the inclusion of a letter of censure in her file that would be removed after five years. The other committee member voted against any sanction. During her suspension, she would retain all of her rights and privileges as a senate faculty member and continue to meet with her graduate students.

For Chancellor Gillman, however, the punishment was not enough. He unilaterally overrode the committee’s recommendations, denying Professor Willoughby-Herard access to campus, including the library, and stripping her of her faculty voting rights, her right to supervise graduate students, and all of her healthcare benefits. Consider what this means for someone who is not only recovering from serious, life-altering injuries caused by police violence but who also suffers from long-term chronic health issues. It is beyond cruel; it is vindictive. And yet, it is not surprising for those of us who have worked with Chancellor Gillman. He is the face of the new University of California (well, maybe not-so-new….). He holds the vaunted position as Chancellor precisely because he has a track record of crushing dissent, adopting corporate-oriented policies, protecting the university’s bottom line at the expense of intellectual growth and “diversity.” In 2013, when Irvine recruited Gillman from USC (my former institution) to become Executive Vice-Chancellor, a large group of UCI faculty sought to block his appointment but did not prevail. His racist, sexist, and politically motivated treatment of Professor Willoughby-Herard is consistent with past behavior and in lockstep with the University of California’s attack on dissent and free speech. Ironically, Gillman’s latest book is Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times, co-authored with Erwin Chemerinsky, published this year by Yale University Press (an updated version of their Free Speech on Campus [2017]).

A committee of concerned faculty circulated a petition, which has more than 5,000 signatures, demanding that the university immediately drop all disciplinary sanctions against Professor Willoughby-Herard. You can sign that petition here. And while you’re at it, consider writing Chancellor Gillman at chancellor@uci.edu demanding that he drop the charges. If you do write him, please bcc: tiffanysolidaritycommittee@gmail.com

It is important to document these letters, not because we believe they will persuade him to suddenly become an ethical and just administrator, but rather to ramp up mass political pressure on UCI and the University of California system as a whole. He needs to be removed. Above all, we want all sanctions against our colleague lifted and all back salary paid immediately.

Finally, Professor Willoughby-Herard is facing a dire financial situation. Currently, she will have no income until the end of the calendar year, she has no medical insurance, and her legal fees are insurmountable. She needs help now! You can help provide much needed financial support by donating here

You can also help by spreading the word, especially to those outside the bubble of academia. These people are coming for all of us, not just academics and activists. And they don’t all look like Trump and Stephen Miller. Sometimes they come in the guise of free speech champions and liberal constitutional scholars.

Cover art by Tavares Strachan

 

From the introduction by Stephanie D. Jones, Deogratius Mshigeni, and Chaz Briscoe:

“We want to love forever, and that love must be funky. To look at what is both inciting and agitating about funk, we look toward Parliament-Funkadelic, who brands us with this demand, this threat, and this call of the mothership. Mothership Connection (1975) opens a biting metaphor through the vocals, composition and lyrics of the group Parliament. Their sound explored how music should be experienced, while their teachings pushes listeners toward the unknown. Their albums use ancient mythology and alien lifeforms light-years away to help us (re)imagine how to (re)conceptualize the here and now. The landing of the Mothership was a prominent feature of Parliament’s show, which always made the crowd erupt. Parliament gave us dreams that one day the Mothership would land in a Black neighborhood near us, and lift us away; carry us home.

Parliament makes it clear that funk is not produced in the US, but they don’t make clear that funk may not be produced in the same space-time. Funk is intergalactic, extraterrestrial. It is the beyond that we can only hear coming. To connect Black geographies to the ruckus of the Mothership is to lay down a bass line for the novice listener. In funk, the baseline is not just a building block or guidepost; it is what can disrupt conventional patterns. We expect that with swing. We understand unconventionality through jazz. Funk is more than just an added breath; it’s more than an added formation—it is purposely disruptive. Black geographies are epistemes of captivity that condition and conform Black life to territories of terror. Within these enclaves, Black life continues to march to a bass line.

What is the Mothership? Is it a tool for liberation or colonization? Is it dependent on scope or depth? What is the Mothership as a calling? What is it as a threat? What we know—what Parliament tells us—is the Mothership gets us to the Beyond. Thus, we must be damn clear what we’re reaching for in the beyond. What Black geographies can teach us is the need to consider… [read in full here]”

 

“Pirating the Mothership: Toward the Funky Poetics of Exilic Futures on the Other Side of the Sky,” by Michael J. Myers II and “Black Movement Geographies: Roller-Skating, Memory, and Black Women’s Embodied Practices of Fugitivity,” by  Ashley L. Smith-Purviance are open access and can be read here.

 

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Forthcoming 2026-2027 issues include guest edited issues on Onyeka Onwenu, Black Nights, Black Agricultural and Food Studies, pushing the configurations of “Blackness,” and more…

Personal subscriptions are $54 USD and include 4 issues (print and online). A limited quantity of print back issues are also available in our store. Issues become available in print in our store once the subsequent issue is released.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Black Scholar invites submissions for a special issue on “Black Nights,” which probes the intersection between blackness and the night. Within distinct and heterogenous regimes of racialization across the globe, nighttime and nightspaces often figure as a critical double-edge: on the one hand, sites of intensified surveillance, policing and repression of Black life, on the other hand, sites of survival, assembly, subversion of established orders and experiments in modes of living in excess to Enlightenment modes of conquest-knowledges and the spatial and temporal enclosures they entail. “Black Nights” aims to probe further the multiple ways in which nighttime and nightspaces emerge as not just a background of Black life, but critical terrains of meaning, contestation, resistance and possibility that both illuminate logics of racialization and their political economy, but also gesture at alternative forms of worldmaking.

WHAT WE STAND TO LOSE: A National Forum on Black Studies Under Fire
Thursday, March 5, 2026 | 7:00 PM ET | 6:00 PM CT
Free & Open to the Public | Zoom Webinar
Register: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9OMl_RnSQVWB0LmdaYzylg#/registration

Panelists include Edmund T. (Ted) Gordon and Ashanté M. Reese (UT Austin), Andrea J. Queeley (Florida International University), and Michael Brandon McCormack (University of Louisville).

This moment calls for exactly what you have already demonstrated: solidarity, urgency, and the willingness to show up. We look forward to seeing you — and your networks — on March 5.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Black Scholar (TBS), a leading journal in the interdisciplinary world of Black Studies, invites submissions for a themed issue on agriculture and food in Black life.

As the first of its kind in TBS‘s history, this themed issue addresses a distinct subfield—Black Agricultural and Food Studies—of Black Studies that has long operated on the sidelines of the discipline. From sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’s early work on Black farmers to anthropologist Jessica B. Harris’s work on Black culinary traditions, this subfield has been obscured by a paradox: the significant role of agriculture and food in the story of Black life and the severe lack of sustained interest in these topics as sites of analysis in Black Studies. This paradox has produced intellectual blind spots, contributing to a robust ecosystem of scholarship and research on Black discourses about farmers, food justice/sovereignty, foodways, culinary innovation, agricultural history, food systems, land justice, and related topics outside of Black Studies journals and publications.

To be very clear, acknowledging Black Studies’ limited engagement with agriculture and food is not an indictment of the discipline. Instead, it is an invitation to raise fundamental questions:

1. How have Black people defined their relationships—past and present—with agriculture and/or food?
2. What theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives are needed to advance the study of agriculture and/or food within Black Studies?
3. What steps are necessary for Black Studies to formally recognize Black Agricultural and Food Studies as an integral subfield of the discipline?

While the guest editor invites scholarly articles and essays that address one of these questions, submissions may explore any aspect of Black people’s historical and contemporary relationships to agriculture and food. These three questions provide a frame for this themed issue, offering an intentional starting point for carving out a space for an established area of focus in Black Studies on agriculture and food. This space is intended to build a collective, intergenerational understanding of agriculture and food in Black life, to sustain interest in these topics in Black Studies, and to open new lines of research. The guest editor hopes that this themed issue showcases a cross-pollination of scholarship that demonstrates agriculture and food as fertile sites for Black thinking—not only reshaping how we think, study, and write about Black life but also reframing how we understand agriculture and food more broadly.

Guest Editor

Bobby J. Smith II

bobbyjs2@illinois.edu

Complete submissions must be submitted to TBS’s landing page on Taylor & Francis’s website by September 1, 2026. Manuscripts should not exceed 4,500-6,000 words (inclusive of endnotes). Black Agricultural and Food Studies will be published as our Fall 2027 issue.

To avoid your article being sent back or rejected, please review all guidelines carefully before submitting.

 

 

Cover Image by Nsenga Knight 

 

From Clarissa Myrick-Harris White’s introduction:

“This double issue of The Black Scholar (TBS) comprises Immortal Malcolm: The Living Legacy of El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (TBS 55.3) and Different Ways of Knowing: Evoking Epistemologies of Black Life and Culture (TBS 55.4). The publication comes to you at the end of a year in which the political power, socio-economic status, and even the history and culture of African Americans have been under relentless attack.

More than 70 years ago, scholar Rayford Logan spoke of “the nadir of the Negro’s status in American society” when writing about the erosion of nascent civil rights gained by African Americans during Reconstruction. (1) He pinpointed this lowest point as the time frame from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the turn of the twentieth century. Another scholar extended the end of the Nadir to 1920. Still others cite the early 1940s as the end of this period of decline. (2) It was during World War II that Black people organized to push for jobs in the war industry, protest against racism and segregation in the military and civilian life, and fight for voting rights and representation. This activism spurred the emergence of the modern-day Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1950s and the Black Power Movement a little more than a decade later. Those in the latter movement, in particular, overtly called the system that has entrapped Black Americans domestic neocolonialism.

It has been argued that people of African descent in America are now in “a second nadir” (3) that started almost a decade ago through political maneuvers that began to snatch away voting rights, economic advancement, opportunities for educational attainment, and any sense of well-being of African Americans.

Ironically, as Africans in America are plunged deeper into a second nadir, elsewhere African people are beginning to emerge from theirs. Recently, around the globe, African women, men and youths have amplified their demand for […]” (continue reading)

 

For a limited time, “Women of Color and Malcolm X’s Enduring Legacy” (with Maytha Alhassen, Nsenga Knight, Denise Lim, Mona Oraby, and Najha Zigbi-Johnson), is free to download and read.

Subscribe to TBS! Personal subscriptions are $54 USD and include 4 issues (print and online). A limited quantity of print back issues are also available in our store. Issues become available in print in our store once the subsequent issue is released.

Cover art by Chidinma Nnoli

From the introduction:

“This issue of The Black Scholar debuts as the country is careening back in time. As in the past, today, we are witnessing a resurgence of attempts to mute diverse voices that interrogate history and warn about the potential for current realities to devolve into a dystopian future. The articles in these pages counter this regressive trajectory and are true to TBS’s primary mission “to chronicle, analyze, and debate the conditions and the emancipatory efforts of Black people across class, nationality, gender, generation, sexuality, and ideology.”

Some may view this mission as anachronistic because it was first articulated at the end of the turbulent 1960s. We believe the response to that is obvious. At this moment in time, the conditions of systemic racism, racially motivated violence, inequality, inequity, and exclusion based on race, as well as sex and sexuality, rival those of the Jim Crow era.

The first three articles in this issue focus specifically on the power of Black women to resist, defeat, or subvert oppressive forces…”

For a limited time, read the full introduction and “Raising Hell: Rebellions of the Black Insane” by Teresa Barnes for free.

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Subscribe to TBS! Personal subscriptions are $49 USD and include 4 issues (print and online). A limited quantity of print back issues are also available in our store. Issues become available in print in our store once the subsequent issue is released.