Chicago Black Social Culture Map
Chicago Black Social Culture Map is a collaboration between Honey Pot Performance, the Modern Dance Music Research and Archiving Foundation, the Blackivists, and a team of local cultural historians and cultural producers, the Chicago Black Social Map exists to preserve Chicago's black social cultural lineage — past, present, and future — through an experience that is both fun and informative.
Through our coursework at SAIC, my project team and I partnered with Honey Pot Performance to develop a sophisticated visual identity for the Chicago Black Social Culture Map by way of contributing to and organizing the archive, presenting its content in a digestible way, and ideating ways to make the database user-friendly and accessible to the public as primary source material.
Our work in fall 2020 focused on archiving information from live panels that Honey Pot Performance hosted as a part of the Chicago Black Social Culture Map project by way of transcription. Our work in spring 2021 expanded the presence of the CBSCM on HPP’s social media. Our team produced content using snippets from previous CBSCM panels to promote HPP's spring 2021 performance schedule. In HPP’s Instagram specifically as a method of publication, our team sought to increase the CBSCM’s presence on HPP’s social media with the intention to appeal to younger audiences. HPP’s partnership with the project team culminated in a curated exhibition and publication on HPP’s blog to showcase their research and highlight the materials in the CBSCM database.
Using the CBSCM live panels as primary source material, I wrote an article titled Partying as Protection, Liberation, and Resistance, which talks about how the house music scene provided spaces that enabled Black youth to experience their adolescence, and it examines the ways in which parties and partying affirmed and protected the lives of Black teens. I argue that looking to teen parties in the history of house culture forces us to envision the possibility of non-punitive forms of social order in our present and challenges us to believe in their efficacy. Our project website can be found here.