remembering bell: Reflections from Community Study, New on up//root

We're excited to share news of a up//root: a we here publication's new series of features now available on their platform: "remembering bell: reflections from Community Study." This series was a collaboration between Community Study and up//root to publish five reflections from the remembering bell Community Study series.

Across the spring and summer months of 2022, participants in Community Study gathered together to honor the work and memory of our beloved ancestor bell hooks. In this series, we reflect on and pay homage to our time together, exploring what bell and these gatherings meant to each of us. -- nicholae cline.

bell hooks held and breathed with us during her time here on this scarred, giving, beautiful earth, nourishing and challenging us with her loving critiques of the world as it is and has been. This is how we remember her.⁠
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The series includes:

loving on bell: an altar, by nicholae cline

Across the spring and summer months of 2022, participants in Community Study gathered together to honor the work and memory of our beloved ancestor bell hooks. In this series, we reflect on and pay homage to our time together, exploring what bell and these gatherings meant to each of us. This brief introduction and expression of gratitude by nicholae cline contextualizes the pieces in this series, highlighting some of the threads that bind these reflections together.⁠

On Reading bell hooks and Community Study as Grief Ritual, by Marissa Arterberry

This is a reflection on Marissa Arterberry’s grieving process in the wake of bell hooks’ death. Participating in a Community Study devoted to reading bell’s work helped her to move through the stages of grief and appreciate the impact her work has had on her life. In this piece, she explores personal milestones that bell was a part of, and shares one of her favorite bell hooks speeches.  

How do you declare love is boundless on a billboard with such stark edges? by jaime ding

A personal reflection on how jaime ding has been thinking about the limits of love, and the unlearning of such restraints.

Can't We All Just Cathect Along, by Brittani Sterling

Many of us find ourselves burnt out, stressed out, understanding how little our humanity means to our organizations, leaders, and institutions—and are at a loss at this point as to what to do about it. If you’ve struggled to figure out why, Brittani Sterling would like to pose the question to you ,“Why can’t we all just cathect along?” Cathexis –the investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea – is something that we all engage in as human beings, but we often conflate it with other positively connoted concepts such as respect, positive conditional regard, and maybe most dangerously, love, some of which we knew we were expecting our institutions to provide us, and others we may have been seeking in exchange for our labor.

Permission to Unpack: An Essay-Poem-Visual Response to ‘Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood,’ by Jennifer Price

The white gaze makes a taboo of BIPOC intimacy. The young witness in bell hooks’ Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood consistently encounters this threat, which harbors erasure and silencing. This piece considers how, as Bone Black affirms, the construction or reconstruction of memory is a necessary recourse for healing and creative release.

I Remember the Listening, by Rebekah McFarland

In this lyric essay, the author explores the impact participating in the 2022 bell hooks Community Study had on their self-perception, role in academia, and belief in community. The author reflects on her agency from her childhood to the present, the impact the community has had on them, and their thoughts on participating in a system made without her and people like her in mind.