The African American Cultural Center is excited to announce the 2025 Symposium on Afrofuturism and Diasporic Scholarship at NC State University. 

Save the Date! February 12, 2025

The Symposium on Afrofuturism and Diasporic Scholarship is hosted by the African American Cultural Center (AACC) alongside several key campus partners including the NC State University Libraries, Interdisciplinary Studies, The College of Natural Resources, and more!

The Symposium features diasporic learning, scholarship, and epistemologies via cutting-edge research, storytelling, creative works, discussion circles, and community projects from NC State and the local community. This symposium promotes student success by elevating diasporic scholarship, research, and intellectual rigor. 

“Storytelling from the Familiar”

We celebrate the experiences and the wisdom embedded in our everyday lives, recognizing that community knowledge, ancestral knowledge, and personal knowledge is a profound form of research. 

We invite you to explore how identity, scholarship, culture, creative work, and research manifest in our daily interactions from the burbs to the bayous, from the trenches to the trailer parks, from the boardroom to the living room, and from the Jack and Jill’s to our metaphorical kitchen table. This symposium aims to disrupt/challenge how we define research by highlighting the stories that emerge from the familiar spaces of Afro-diasporic ways of knowing.

By embracing and uplifting these familiar stories, we affirm that no experience disqualifies one from being a researcher; instead, these varied perspectives enrich our collective understanding and push the boundaries of conventional scholarship.

Join us at our metaphorical kitchen table, where everyday experiences become transformative praxis and we uplift Storytelling from the Familiar. 

Guiding Principles

The symposium will embrace and reflect the following guiding principles. Please download the Grounding Document to learn more about the symposium.

• Practice Sankofa – learning from the past to build a future.
• Be Futuristic – building on theories of afrofuturism (Womack, 2013), African futurism (Okorafor, 2019; Wabuke, 2020), and astro-Blackness (Anderson & Jones, 2016), these theories imagine a future where Black people do indeed exist, free from white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, extreme capitalism, and the violence of imperial wars. The “work of the imagination” as Robin D. G. Kelley frames it, offers us tools to craft “new visions” in a radical act of worldbuilding (Kelley, 2022).
• Embody Ubuntu – build with and alongside community; increase capacity; honor our interconnectedness; build solidarity.
• Each One Teach One – everyone has knowledge to share; decenter hierarchical power dynamics, center lived experiences and stories; cultivate intergenerational interactions and learning opportunities.
• Foster Harambee – champion mutually supportive and relational ways of engaging with community, be relevant; offer solutions; share resources; ground theory in practice/praxis
• Be Sustainable – create structures and systems that are equitable and just; be good stewards of our resources; build systems and institutions that can be replicated.
• Be Emergent – value transformation, change, creativity, growth, and innovation; center relational ways of being; overstand that the process is just as important as the finished product (“emergent”) (Brown, 2017).
• Rest as Revolution – nurture holistic practices and spirituality; be whole; be authentic.

Storying & Truth Telling

“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.”

-Zora Neal Hurston / Dust Tracks on the Road, 1942

“The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want it to be. More than ever before we, as a society, need to renew a commitment to truth telling.”

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, 1999

Proposals

Proposals opening soon! Check back or follow us on Instagram @aaculturalcenter