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| Tajah Ebram and Amanda Awanjo at the close of the Networking Black Print Conference |
Throughout the conference, people rightly thanked Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith L. McGill, the project co-directors, for making the gathering possible. Goldsby and McGill, in turn, gave shoutouts to Awanjo and Ebram for their efforts, as well as the overall core team.
In addition to acknowledging Goldsby, McGill, Awanjo, and Ebram for their leadership, I wish we were even better positioned to take stock of the full range of labor and, just as important, serious thinking required to pull off projects of this scale.
Roles like Project Manager and Team Lead, which Awanjo and Ebram occupy, are critically needed but not that common in African American literary studies. It’s also true that we do not have many large-scale projects like the Black Bibliography Project.
Both Ebram and Awanjo have PhDs in literary studies, and that they are working on a major project central to African American literary studies but not as formal literary scholars says something to us about how academic work is structured and the value of thinking beyond traditional scholarly roles. Ebram and Awanjo are showing us what that looks like.
For quite some time now, I’ve been thinking and writing about scholar-organizers for literary gatherings. Those scholars in our discipline who convene conferences, institutes, and collaborative initiatives have been essential to the development and formation of intellectual communities. By hosting “Networking Black Print: Reimagining Black Bibliography,” Goldsby and McGill contribute to a rich continuum of scholar-organizing.
And Awanjo and Ebram allow us to think in other directions as well. Over the last few years, they have been supervising teams of graduate students and now undergraduates for this project. In the process, they have had to manage people, budgets, visits to different universities and libraries, room and tech assistance reservations, communications, scheduling, and workflow systems.
All these and more activities constitute what I refer to as the invisible workings of African American literary studies. We tend to think of scholarly articles and books as the most visible intellectual features of the discipline. But what about the everyday activities or the special events like conferences or collaborative research projects? These are all forms of labor and coordination that Awanjo and Ebram handle on a regular basis.
And let’s not forget the critical role of anticipation in project management and conference coordination. So much involves thinking through and imagining the needs of participants long before invitations go out and well before the conference takes place. They anticipate, for instance, that people like me will ask how to get from the airport to the hotel and from the hotel to the campus sessions.
The practice of anticipation is so integral to the toolbox of a good project manager and team lead that, somewhere in their unwritten playbook for their duties, I'm convinced that they have little Post-it note reminders to themselves that read: be able to see into the future.
In graduate school, we learn quite a bit about performing the roles of teacher and scholar. But project manager? Team lead? We rarely receive instruction in those areas, yet as Ebram and Awanjo reveal, that kind of expertise is essential to the success of large-scale projects in African American literary studies.
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