Re-mixing Wakanda

The recent box office success of the film Black Panther has moved Afrofuturism as a political, cultural and aesthetic concern from a niche or underground position into a major cultural movement. With the continued critical and public successes of artists and activists steeped in Afrofuturist aesthetics including Janelle Monae, Kamasi Washington, Kendrick Lamar, and Bootsy Collins, young people are becoming increasingly well-versed and proficient in understandings, visions, and expressions of and for a Black future.

In collaboration with professor Michael Dando, the Re-mixing Wakanda project examines how youth from communities historically underrepresented and overlooked in the sciences might use Afrofuturism and critical making to create new representations of and for themselves and their community. This project investigates how young people communicate and articulate who they see themselves to be and why this matters, through an epistemological framework that questions and reimagines the present and past--seeing each as collections of objects, representations, and meanings that can be modified, mixed, and repurposed to imagine future societies and technologies that center people of color. It is through this interdisciplinary and sociocultural lens we re-imagine both STEAM and makerspaces that disrupt dominant notions of what can and should occur as well as dominant understandings of who belongs and can excel in these fields