September 20, 2023

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter uprisings, Black researchers faced an influx of attention to their work. Suddenly a wide variety of audiences were interested in learning about healthcare, technology, and data from minoritized perspectives. While increased focus on this critical work was a welcome response to a public health crisis, it is impossible to ignore that the academic accolades were spurred in part by the disproportionate deaths of Black people.

Although attention to the pandemic and its associated harms continues to wane with each passing year, its impact on Black researchers remains salient. Even amid a greater focus on DEI in academia, which also drew backlash, these researchers continue to face racism and impossible standards for production and perfection, compounded by the emotional toll of studying Black traumas.

Before planning the convening that would become “Nurturing the Network: Blackness, Trust, and Health Tech,” we had several conversations with Black health tech workers, thinkers, and researchers that uncovered a deep sense of burnout. Insights from those conversations revealed the need for a moment where Black people in the field could come together and connect around their mutual experiences of living through a time that necessitated emotionally and intellectually exhausting work. In turn, the convening aimed to provide a micro-community within the field and our network with a space for that profoundly needed rest and community-based healing.

In her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe theorizes a praxis that emerges from accepting the totalizing nature of anti-Black racism while also searching for ways to counter its violence. “In the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present,” Sharpe writes, reflecting on the endurance of Black subjugation. We were determined to ensure that the lessons, values, and relationships nurtured during the past years’ crises were not forgotten.

With a few months of planning, Nurturing the Network grew into a three-hour virtual session, held over Zoom on June 23, 2023, attended by a small group of researchers, designers, and artists. Some attendees already knew one another from their time in the field, overlapping work, and meetings at conferences. Others, non-researchers still working in the spheres of Black health tech, were meeting everyone for the first time. Deeply protective of the space, we prioritized the privacy, wellness, and feelings of the participants above all, and used the Chatham House Rule to keep intimate details sacred to the room while allowing the learnings to spread beyond it.

Though we did not plan to build a space that was exclusively for Black women, Black women did what they’re known to do and showed up: the group was made up entirely of Black women with similar experiences in and out of the field. The opening introductory session highlighted many shared pain points within this community, including how readily each person had neglected themselves during the pandemic. While they all did critical work about, with, and in the Black community, in the virtual space they reflected on how little time they’d actually had to rest.

While building this space, we understood it was critical to decenter “production” as a purpose for gathering. In academia, convenings are often centered around knowledge production — conferences, panels, and workshops require people to bring their hard work to the table in order to be a part of the academic community. Knowing that we would be convening a group that had already been asked to lend their time, knowledge, and expertise to challenging and painful issues around Black health, life, and death, we purposefully did not ask any of the participants to write or contribute or create anything: no papers, no reports, and no retrospectives.

As a result, the focus was on meditation, rest, and reflection. An hour-long meditation session was led by Jasmine Johnson, co-founder and meditation guide of Black Zen, an organization created to support Black and brown communities in discovering the benefits of meditation and wellness-based practices. The session encouraged the attendees to clear their minds, scan their bodies, and ground themselves in the shared space.

Later, the group engaged each other through a set of prepared questions aimed at exploring their inspirations and values, and how those elements showed up in their work (or didn’t). These questions, inspired by an earlier Data & Society workshop led by Anaïs Duplan, prompted lively discussion and reflections on what matters to us when we do our work: being excited by learning, contributing to a ever-expanding tapestry of knowledge and inspiration, developing the discipline to say no, and cultivating the discernment to know when to say yes.

In prioritizing the community, Nurturing the Network was designed to provide Black cultural workers with space for the kind of rest we had learned was so needed and desired. Spaces where Black researchers can engage in mindful practice and decompress within a trusted community are necessary because they provide a time to emphasize rest, and define boundaries and values from within — and specifically because they deprioritize production. But it takes effort and intentionality to build community, and even more to maintain trust. Gathering experts without making knowledge production a core goal takes real resources, including funding, collaboration, and time. These spaces don’t just happen; if you want them to exist, you have to build them. Our experience showed us that they are worth the effort.