Over the years I have prepared and delivered various presentations on W.E.B. Du Bois. Not all of the lectures have been created to be online-accessible. On this page I provide links to my public talks on various topics relevant to Du Bois's thought and activism.
My
biography and
C.V. (with a list of my other presentations and publications) also are located on this website.
A Note on Presentation Formats: Several of the talks listed below consist of a single web page whose content is presented as one long document (Items 1, 2, and 10).
The others are formatted as hypertext presentations. I created the hypertext format as a browser-based application using Javascript and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for its features and functionality. Because I continuously update and upgrade the hypertext application, talks presented earlier may not have the same hypertext features as those that I presented later. The Navigation Help page lists the available functions of each hypertext presentation; this information is found on the second page after the start page.
The symposium commemorated the centennial of the 1906 meeting of the Niagara Movement at Harpers Ferry, WV. My focus was on Du Bois's "Address to the Country" which he wrote to express the political demands of the Movement. I interpreted the document in terms of the spatiality of politics, specifically space, place, and scale. The Harpers Ferry National Historical Park Service and the Harpers Ferry Historical Association sponsored this event. I presented on 18 August 2006.
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I posted this presentation for the 1 November 2020 update.]
In February 2013 Clark Atlanta University, under the leadership of Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans, convened
the W.E.B. Du Bois 50th Anniversary Commemorative Conference. I presented a paper entitled "Embracing Philosophy: On Du Bois's 'The Individual and Social Conscience
'". This talk is my first discussion of the IASC in a public forum. Before speaking I provided an outline to the audience. I subsequently elaborated upon that lecture, which was published in
Phylon. The amplified
OUTLINE version is housed on this site. I provide more details on the outline page.
My presentation was part of the Bennett College Faculty Lecture Series, which I delivered on 22 January 2015. I addressed the topic of "W.E.B. Du Bois and the Paradox of Democracy", focusing on "Of the Ruling of Men" (Chapter VI in his
Darkwater). I outlined Du Bois's support of extending the franchise and of widening the scope of citizen participation over large-scale industries. In my hypertext
PRESENTATION I discussed the importance of "Ruling" with regard to Du Bois's contributions to democratic theorizing, including his concept of unknowability. Note that this presentation uses an earlier version of the hypertext format and thus contains somewhat less functionality than later versions.
The Department of the Sociology and Criminal Justice at Clark Atlanta University hosted the "Symposium Celebrating the 120th Anniversary of the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory and the Work of W.E.B. Du Bois" on 25 February 2016. I titled my talk "W.E.B. Du Bois on Scientific Knowledge and Its Limits". I developed a typology of knowledge claims found in Du Bois's texts, including current and future knowledge, uncertain knowledge, and that which is fundamentally unknowable. My
PRESENTATION is available herein as a web-based hypertext.
The African American Studies and Research Center at Purdue University hosted this symposium on 1-3 December 2016. The theme of the symposium was "Exploring the 'Humanity' in the Digital Humanities". This hypertext
PRESENTATION used collation software to highlight the interconnections between two sets of Du Bois's works. I argued that his concept of humanity was not exhausted by any one text: indeed, the concept expanded its analytical and geo-historical scope in the context of world events, such as World War One. I include this lecture as part of my continuing projects on Du Bois from the perspectives of the
digital humanities.
Organized by the African American Intellectual History Society, this conference was held at Vanderbilt University on 24-25 March 2017. In my hypertext
PRESENTATION I argued that, for Du Bois, what we cannot know (nescience) is as important as what we can know about now or in the future. I reconstructed Du Bois's understanding of the relationship of science with nescience in terms of what we can know about and what we can know directly. I also examined the implications of DuBoisian ne
/science for scholarly research, politics, and activism.
This symposium was convened at Clark Atlanta University, on 22-23 February 2018. In my abstract I state:
Martin Luther King, Jr. in his 1968 tribute, "Honoring Dr. Du Bois", praises the civil rights leader and Pan-Africanist as a champion for oppressed peoples around the world, one whose scholarship informs his pursuit of justice and peace. I wish to supplement King's cogent summary of Du Bois's research and activism by analyzing another dimension of the quest for truth.
According to Du Bois, social research faces limits on what its methods can know-about. In particular, some areas of human behavior yield uncertain knowledge or else remain unknowable in principle. For example, he indicates that some details of history are unrecoverable, and thereby unknowable. Also, we cannot know directly another's personal experiences. The types of uncertainty and unknowability delineated by him I label as nescience. For Du Bois, nescience does not prelude activism; indeed, he responds in various activist ways. Historical unknowability prompts him to write socially conscious fiction, while unknowable individuals justify his advocacy to incorporate, via suffrage, their "excluded wisdom" into governance. Thus, in addition to (social) science informing activism, Du Bois argues that what we do not know—our nescience—also must inform and motivate our struggles.
In this presentation I outline King's "Honoring Dr. Du Bois", emphasizing his discussion of the research/activism nexus. Then, I detail several of Du Bois's forms of nescience and their consequences for activism. Lastly, I illustrate the role of unknowability in recent examples of social activism, such as Black Lives Matter, Afrofuturism, and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. I seek to highlight, ultimately, the relevance of Du Boisian nescience for 21st Century struggles against racial and economic inequalities.
I subsequently revised and published a version of this talk as an article, "M.L. King's Abiding Tribute to W.E.B. Du Bois: Research, Activism, and the Unknowable." It was published in Phylon, 56:1 (Summer 2019): 134-155.
My presentation is part of the session "The Problem of Democratic Culture in the American Pragmatist Tradition". I examine how Du Bois in the early 1900s frames chance, human agency, and Darwinian thought in terms of his understanding of Jamesian Pragmatism—a formulation by which he criticizes White supremacism and racial barriers to opportunity.
Paul Gilroy's concept of the Black Atlantic emphasizes Africana agency and subjectivity in the creation of modernity.
The concept highlights the varied sources and routes involved in the generation of culture and meaning.
I argue that there is a methodological analog to the geographical displacement expressed in the Black Atlantic concept.
I coded a browser-based application, Retextualizer, to perform textual displacement on Du Bois's 'Souls' essay (1904) [along with a small set of other essays]. Retextualizer will reconfigure the sentences of the essay as a way to emulate the multiple routes that are integral to the creation of meaning. The conference session was entitled "(Re)Envisioning Data" and I presented on 20 October 2018.
The symposium is sponsored by the Departments of Sociology and of African & African American Studies at Harvard University [
website].
I discuss the pragmatic aspects of Du Bois's thought (especially in terms of Du Bois mediating the pragmatism of William James with his own racial experiences), as well as the philosophical situations in which his pragmatic dimensions are textually evident (specifically, under situations of unknowability). I briefly end the talk with the relevance of a Du Boisian pragmatism for today, including the valuation of the "excluded wisdom" embodied in marginalized communities.
The panel was entitled "Du Bois and Pragmatism". Due to time constraints I coded the presentation as a short, one-page document; it is not in my usual hypertext format. I presented on 27 October 2018.
This project puts forth two goals. First, how did Du Bois conceive of the relationship between democracy and the sciences? (The latter for him include the social sciences, the natural sciences, and often history). Second, how can we approach such an interconnection of ideas within Du Bois's numerous writings?
I outline an approach called interpretive concordancing, which allows us to explore a corpus via a concordancer using specific search protocols (i.e., regexes: regular expressions). For this project I created a partial corpus of about 200 texts. Interpretive concordancing involves an analytical phase in which the texts are studied in terms of their component parts: namely, the words and their synonyms that express Du Bois's ideas. During this phase I list n-grams of 2- and 3-word phrases, as well as seek single words or phrases (called node words) within their textual contexts. Also, I conduct proximity searching for word pairs that occur a certain number of characters apart. Lastly, in the synthesizing phase of interpretive concordancing I assemble the ideas of the texts, as evidenced in the search results, into an argument that conveys Du Bois's understanding of the democracy/science relationship.
Interpretive concordancing leads me to this argument. For Du Bois, democracy and science each supports the other and each limits the other. Within a specified domain of action and policy (my phrase) one predominates due to the other's limited scope of knowledge. The sciences, by grasping the natural laws of economic production, could tell us "how" to produce and distribute goods and services, but not the "whats", the "whys", and the "how-muchs". That was the realm of citizens and democratic participation. Each generates only a portion of the overall knowledge that Du Bois considered vital for governance.
[I created the document as a longish, one-page HTML file; it is not a hypertext presentation.] [I added this entry for the 1 March 2021 update.]
In this presentation I discuss how Digital Humanities tools and techniques—here, a concordancer employing regular expression (regex) searching protocols—can be used to analyze a collection of W.E.B. Du Bois's texts, This corpus is not comprehensive and not representative of his 2000 published writings. My particular research goal focuses on exploring the corpus for the ways by which Du Bois expresses the idea of the "unknowable", whether by specific word or related synonyms and phrases.
I sketch the research work flow which involves ways to locate words in the corpus via regex-oriented concordancing, and then requires reading the co-text closely in order to disambiguate the same word or phrase into its different conceptual meanings.
I also outline several findings that point to two forms of the "unknowable" in Du Bois's thinking: the lack of direct knowledge of others' experiences and the impossibility of ever knowing some things.
I presented on 7 September 2021.
[This document is a one-page HTML file, not a hypertext presentation.]
[I added this entry for the 1 September 2021 update.
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What did Du Bois consider to be important to a "science of human action" especially in terms of what the phrase tells us about his conceptions of science, about the knowledge produced, and about the nature of the actions created by humans?
I approach this topic from a humanities perspective that explores Du Bois's understanding of social research and the humans being studied. I build on the techniques studied in my NCPSA 2021 and JADH 2021 projects (listed above) by using a concordancer with regular expressions (regexes). I apply them on a corpus of texts by Du Bois in order to study the nuances of Du Bois's "science of human action". Using such techniques allows us to locate any potentially synonymous phrasing—which is necessary given that Du Bois used the specific phrase in only a few, mostly later, texts. This project addresses four research questions and presents the results.
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I presented this on 20 September 2021. This document is a one-page HTML file, not a hypertext presentation.
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[I added this entry for the 1 October 2021 update.
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The project delineates concordancer-mediated techniques that I formulated to study W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of "democratic despotism". As a distinct phrase he only included it in two writings (in 1915 and 1930). But via computationally based conceptual analysis we can locate the synonymous ways in different works by which Du Bois expressed the idea that democracy could be promoted within colonizing countries which nonetheless oppressed and exploited peoples of color around the world.
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I discussed the poster on 10 June 2022. This document is a 4'x3' one-page poster that can be viewed as either a PDF file or a PNG graphics file. It is not a hypertext presentation.
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[I added this entry for the 1 June 2022 update.
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Abstract: As a scholar of W.E.B. Du Bois I seek to understand better the concepts and ideals by which he made sense of his world, and by which he justified his activism. Here, I address his concept of the unknowable, a condition arising when evidence was unrecoverable or even impossible to know. Du Bois used the specific word "unknowable" in a few texts, but in other works he synonymously conveyed the idea without employing the word itself. Did more writings contain such onomasiological indicators? To locate any relevant passages, I utilized my non-representative corpus of his texts, which I searched with different types of regular expressions via a concordancer. In the presentation I will reflect critically on my corpus and methods. My research connects me—interweaves my efforts—with Du Bois's concepts and texts because my choices and experiences guide me on what to explore, how to explore it, and ultimately mediate my interpretations. The techniques are valuable: they preserve his meaningful utterances about the unknowable (also to be presented), while allowing us to study his texts as one unit. Nonetheless, corpus creation and regexing are not neutral procedures; each influences what we (can) understand about Du Bois's ideas.
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This document is a one-page HTML file, not a hypertext presentation.
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[I added this entry for the 1 September 2022 update.
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