marcus singleton, July 18, 2022
Although we did not meet all the goals we set for the Network this year, we believe we have done some critical work. Most crucially, we have kept the NBGN going (and even growing to 209 members) through a particularly challenging time. Despite the pandemic, we are still trying to figure out how to keep the members interactive and engaged the best we can by posting 1-2 posts on the message board and 1-3 blog posts per semester.
The current NBGN Staff (Festus and marcus) also came up with the idea to create a WhatsApp group (where we currently have 18 participants) to keep the members engaged in communication and networking. The idea behind creating the WhatsApp group is to bridge the gap between blogs/ message board posts and NBGN members. Alternatively, we wanted to create more activity and traffic to the website for every blog and message we post. We created the WhatsApp group to further the NBGN mission to promote communication and collaboration among Black graduate students and students of Black Studies in Canada. For activities we did in Fall 2021, please refer to our Fall newsletter, at this link: https://nbgn.ca/blog-post/nbgn-fall-2021-newsletter-repo
CONFERENCES
CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR GRADUATE STUDIES (NOVEMBER 2021)
The NBGN team (Cherie Daniel, Crystal Jardine-Garvey, Jada Joseph, Festus Ajayi, and marcus singleton) at the CAGS Career Corner Webinar and the 2022 Black Canadian Studies Association Conference
Since the team we assembled for the 59th Annual CAGS Conference went so well we decided to reassemble the same team for the CAGS Career Corner webinar where we had a roundtable discussion on Navigating Your Career Transition: Insight and Advice for Black, Indigenous, and Racialized Graduate Students Searching for Careers with a purpose. We were able to share our own personal experiences as Black graduate students and offer advice on what it means to choose a career driven with a purpose to serve Black, Indigenous, and Racialized communities and people. We wanted the conversation to be real but informative, and we believe we achieved just that.
BLACK CANADIAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION (MAY 2022)
On Saturday, May 14, 2022, the NBGN team also facilitated a panel discussion at the Black Canadian Studies Association (BCSA) conference. The theme for the BCSA conference was Black Solidarities, Thought, and the quest for Freedom. The topic the team tacked during the panel discussion was (Un)settled Narratives: A discussion of Racial Capitalism, Policing, Cyberbullying, and Higher Education. Not only did we use the panel discussion to tackle the issues within the panel topic, but we were also able to highlight our research work.
COMMUNICATIONS
NBGN WHATSAPP GROUP
The NBGN Staff thought it would be a great idea to create an NBGN WhatsApp group so we can communicate with NBGN members in real time. The idea is to post messages in the WhatsApp chat to direct NBGN members to the NBGN Website to create more traction. We still have only 19 members, but we plan to increase that number by the end of the 2022-2023 school year.
MESSAGE BOARD POSTS
On December 15, 2021, bell hooks, made her transition from the earthly realm to the ancestral plane, and we as an NBGN staff wanted to do something to celebrate and honour her life. We came up with an idea to post a quote from bell hooks every Monday, and we called it bell hooks Mondays. We did our best to be consistent with posting quotes by her every week. Please see the quotes we posted below:
- January 24
- Poetry is a useful place for lamentation. . .poems are a place where we can cry out.
- January 27
- Peace NBGN family, ATTENTION: This is a call for a bell hooks blog post. We are looking for an NBGN student attending a university west of Ontario: Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan to write a blog post on how bell hooks literary legacy has impacted you personally or how her work has informed your work or both. We would like the blog to be written and posted by February 14th. You will also receive $150 for writing the post. If you are interested, please email us at hello@nbgn.ca ASAP. We look forward to reading and posting your blog. In peace, NBGN Staff
- January 31
- Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love to fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.
- February 7
- One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn’t it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim “You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself” made clear sense. And I add, “Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.
- February 14
- Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love (loving) relationships when we know each other, and it takes time to know each other.
- February 28
- Moving from solitude into community heightens our capacity for fellowship with one another. Through fellowship, we learn how to serve one another. Service is another dimension of communal love.
- March 7
- Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made, to be honest, then the next step on love’s path is communication.
DROP-IN SESSIONS
We hosted 15 drop-in sessions every Monday for thirty to sixty minutes with the hope that members would attend. Even though the attendance was consistently low, or no one attended at all, the idea was for us as a staff to be consistently present in case any members would attend. The plan was to start a small group of consistent members to attend and create space for the group to grow from there.
CONCLUSION
We are looking forward to the 2022—2023 school year and super excited that Cherie Daniels will be returning to the team. We are also thrilled to resume the Chill & Chats where more members can present their research work to create more networking opportunities to build community. We are in the process of creating a new video campaign to feature the research work of NBGN members. And as COVID-19 restrictions are starting to soften, we hope to host in-person events for us to create more synergy among our members. We are looking forward to engaging our members in new, creative and exciting ways for us all to stay connected across the provinces of Canada. See you next school year!
