Grantee: Britton Williams

Discipline: Social Welfare

Funding Cycle: 2022–2023

Project Status: In Process

White Paper: 

About the Project: The Black MAP Project is a public facing dissertation research project that seeks to historicize and (re)imagine mental health care for Black people(s) through a liberatory lens. Designed as an online historic archive of Black aesthetics, this project lifts the deep history of Black music, performance, embodied and enacted practices as expression, cultural memory, resistance, freedom dreaming, and liberatory praxis. The Black MAP Project is meant to be both a co-created archive and a free and accessible resource. An outgrowth of this project has been the development of call and response (CaR) as a research method. CaR method encourages the researcher to acknowledge and contend with the emergent thought(s), material(s), encounter(s), that shape and are shaped by the work. I put forth CaR as a method that recognizes and shares process as a core component of the research.

Innovation Grant Focus: A (documentary style) video will be created that weaves across the phases of this project to lift elements of the assemblage, which includes histories, narratives, practices, and praxes of Black creative healing and practices of liberation.

The Black MAP Website: www.thebmp.org