On July 14th, 2020, ProPublica published “A Teenager Didn’t Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention”, a story about “Grace”, a fifteen-year-old who was sent to a detention center for remote learning infractions. While the larger story involves injustices of the legal system often experienced by minoritized students, there is also a smaller indictment. The surveillance technologies embedded in educational technology tools that allowed learning to continue during the onslaught of COVID-19 can have disproportionately negative effects for minoritized students. Using Grace’s story, I examine the connection between surveillance and racial capitalism in relation to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, implications of the converged state of pandemic learning and possible solutions are discussed.
This article explores how Monique Samuels’s role in The Real Housewives of Potomac (TRHOP) and in her Not For Lazy Moms (NFLM) branded spaces, works both for and against the new momism to make visible black women’s experiences navigating essentialism, choice, and the identity work of black motherhood. Samuels’s positionality as a black woman leveraging her essential oils storyline into building a brand for herself brings the franchise into new cultural terrain: “the new momism.” Douglas and Michaels (2004) describe the new momism as a celebration of motherhood that encourages agency and autonomy but ultimately centers on intense devotion to childrearing. Samuels’s TRHOP storylines and extratextual self-fashioning deploy the tenets of the new momism and disrupt its inherent white supremacy to authenticate her identity through essential oils as a wellness commodity and curate an affective space for black women with her NFLM lifestyle brand.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.