notes on citation (studio)*
each issue of new terms & conditions is an entry toward building abc glossary — a glossary for an anti-colonial black feminist critical media ecology. contribute your own new term & condition at abcglossary.xyz to be part of this project.
there’s now almost 300 of us here. i see the growing number as evidence of those who speak my name and life into my practice in rooms i’m not in. i’m very appreciative to everyone who has.
with spring in bloom, i am slowly re-emerging and with that i have been revisiting the words i use to define my practice. housing my practice within a studio, rather than simply under my own name, forces me to gain deeper clarity on the why and how of my practice. over the years, memory has been a central theme in my life. the question of “who gets remembered and how do we remember” has fueled both my academic and creative practices as i’ve pursued public memory work, throughout my career in museums and technology.
if memory is the act of remembering, citation is how we give name and honor to those not in the room but always present — and how we stay present to the past. to cite someone is to locate them in the archive, and carry them forward. there’s a geographical element to citational practice, along with the temporal, that i love in the ways it becomes a cartography for refusal, repair, and navigating reconnection with ancestral intelligence.
we create lineage through citation — which is a powerful and dangerous tool that has been weaponized to sever us from our connections to non-cis-white-patriarchal-western forms of knowing. citation is an invitation to ask, how do we come into shape and form? i am interested in the bonds and network that are repaired through the process of remembering, naming, and mapping.
citation studio was born out of these explorations of many many years, that can take various forms. i’ve come to define citation studio as an experimental thinking and art practice reimagining infrastructures of care and technology, by weaving together memory, nature, and computing, and myself as a cyber anthropologist and writer. through my citational practice i hold myself accountable to the alternative histories and legacies for how we connect with each other and nature.
my thinking currently spans across three projects:
abc — new terms & conditions was created as a vessel to practice in public my own learning of computing history and (re)connecting to Black and indigenous ways of computing and technologies. each issue is an entry for an anti-colonial Black feminist critical media ecology glossary.
abcglossary.xyz will soon be an open access library of terms that have been redefined. visit the site to contribute a term that should be reimagined outside of colonial frameworks.
home is how i heal — is my newest offering that i’m excited to share. home is how i heal is a visual diary and meditation on learning to make living an art, softly and sustainably as a Black queer eco-conscious femme. it is both a monthly newsletter and youtube channel, where i will be exploring my relationship to home, care, and nature.
read issues 001 and 002 in the archive, and watch the accompanying “slowing down time | a visual meditation.”
zora — is a much longer study, simmering in the background. you may see a thing or no-thing, as i build a relationship with her canon of work. i have been really drawn to zora neale hurston as a Black foremother in anthropology and her fugitivity to any one discipline, which i’ve written about here.
right now i keep a place for her online, as i sit with the questions of what would Zora do with, for, on the internet? how would she spill across cyberspace? how can her archival methods be embodied by our current technologies, and in what ways does Hurston's practice teach us how to refuse contemporary forms of technological capture?
i’m excited to continue to grow and follow the threads of my practice inside of this container. next month, i’ll return with the next glossary entry and popping up at the 2025 Black Zine Fair. more on that below:
citation studio will be at the 2025 Black Zine Fair on may 3!
the 2025 Black Zine Fair, organized by Sojourners for Justice Press and hosted by Powerhouse Arts, is ★ free ★ and open to the public. i’ll be there exhibiting some new works from inside citation studio.
★ Date: Saturday, May 3
★ Time: 11am-6pm
★ Location: Powerhouse Arts (322 3rd Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11215)
★ Cost: Free with RSVP
citations
cite black women: a critical praxis (a statement), Smith, C.A., Williams, E.L., Wadud, I.A., Pirtle, W.N.L., Feminist Anthropology, 2: 10-17. (2021)
»It’s simple: Cite Black Women. Black women have been producing knowledge since we blessed this earth. We theorize, we innovate, we revolutionize the world. We do not need mediators. We do not need interpreters. It is time to disrupt the canon. It is time to upturn the erasures of history.
It is time to give credit where credit is due: cite Black women. Cite Black Women is more than just a catchphrase or a hashtag: it is an emphatic statement, a command, a rebuke, a call to action, a celebration, an act of rebellion, an ethos, and an act of love.1 Behind it lies this critical question: What does it look like to dismantle the patriarchal, white supremacist, heterosexist, imperialist impetus of the neoliberal university (and its accomplices) by centering Black women’s ideas and intellectual contributions?…«
Making Feminist Points, posted on September 11, 2013 by feministkilljoys, sarah ahmed.
»I would describe citation as a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies…
When we think this question “who appears?” we are asked a question about how spaces are occupied by certain bodies who get so used to their occupation that they don’t even notice it. They are comfortable, like a body that sinks into a chair that has received its shape over time. To question who appears is to become the cause of discomfort. It is almost as if we have a duty not to notice who turns up and who doesn’t. Just noticing can get in the way of an occupation of space.«
new terms & conditions is part of abc glossary, a glossary for an anti-colonial black feminist critical media ecology. visit abcglossary.xyz for more.
© 2025 New Terms & Conditions