Ruth Nicole Brown
Professor and the Inaugural Chairperson | Michigan State University
East Lansing, CA, UNITED STATES
Ruth Nicole Brown is an expert in African American, African studies and Black girlhood, who is focused on community-engaged scholarship.
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Biography
Ruth Nicole Brown is Professor and the Inaugural Chairperson of the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Brown grew up in Park Forest and Chicago Heights, IL nurtured by bold and determined practices of collective possibility. She continues to activate home truths and bring other’s to futures of radical creative power and praxis through Saving Our Lives, Hearing Our Truths (SOLHOT), a collective Brown founded in 2006 to celebrate Black girlhood by meeting Black girls face to face and heart to heart.
SOLHOT has received support from The Novo Foundation (2018-2021), campus grants, non-profit institutions, and those who actively participate. A Whiting Foundation Public Engagement Fellow (2019-2020), Brown’s Black Girl Genius Week (BGGW) exhausts the rituals of SOLHOT to widen the cipher and experience the imaginative worlds, knowledge, and artistry that only occurs when Black girls, women, and femmes are together as homegirls. BGGW has taken place in central Illinois (2014, 2016, & 2019), Columbia, SC (2019 & 2020), and Chicago, IL (2019 & 2020).
Nicknamed “Dr. B” by the homegirls of SOLHOT, she has published two books, Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood (University of Illinois Press, 2013) and Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward A Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy (Peter Lang, 2009), co-edited several anthologies, Disrupting Qualitative Inquiry: Possibilities and Tensions in Educational Research with Rozana Carducci and Candace Kuby (Peter Lang, 2014) and Wish To Live: The Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy Reader with Chamara J. Kwakye (Peter Lang, 2012), and written numerous journal articles.
Dr. Brown is an artist who earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in Political Science, with graduate certificates in World Performance Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies. She earned other stripes in the SOLHOT cipher and the band We Levitate, a collaboration with bandbaes, Dr. Porshe Garner, Jessica Robinson, and Dr. Blair E. Smith. We Levitate has devised and/or performed in several SOLHOT shows, including “The Mixtape Remix” (2011) and “Check In!” (2010). Brown’s performance work also includes, “The Rest is Work” (2018) and “Thank you, for the Blood” (2020).
Industry Expertise (2)
Writing and Editing
Education/Learning
Areas of Expertise (4)
Political Science
African Studies
African American Studies
Black Girlhood
Education (1)
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor: Ph.D., Political Science
Links (1)
News (3)
MSU African American and African studies seeks “technologies of living for survival into wellness"
WKAR online
2020-11-13
We do so with Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown, the Inaugural Chairperson and Professor of AAAS, Dr. Tamura Lomax, Foundational Associate Professor of AAAS, Dr. Kristie Dotson, Executive Academic Advisor to AAAS and Professor of Philosophy, and Dr. April Baker-Bell, continuing member of the transition team and Associate Professor of Language, Literacy and English Education...
Reading up on race? Here are more than 30 Michigan authors to check out
Michigan Radio online
2020-06-02
Books about race continue to dominate best seller lists. Weeks after outrage spilled into the streets over the killing of George Floyd, readers - mostly white readers, it seems - are trying to learn more about the work of anti-racism. Ruth Nicole Brown: Chairperson, African American and African Studies, Michigan State University...
Collectively Building Anew: The Department of African American and African Studies
MSU online
At the helm of this momentous effort are Ruth Nicole Brown, Inaugural Chair of AAAS, and Tamura Lomax, Founding Associate Professor.“We are meeting, working, desiring, and actively dreaming up this new department in a global pandemic,” Brown said. “These days, the unknown is perhaps our greatest certainty. We are also newly building and that includes a great amount of uncertainty also...”
Journal Articles (5)
Adverse Childhood Experiences Are Associated with Childhood-Onset Arthritis in a National Sample of US Youth: An Analysis of the 2016 National Survey of Children's Health
The Journal of Pediatrics2020 To determine whether there is an association between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and childhood-onset arthritis, comparing youth with arthritis to both healthy youth and youth with other acquired chronic physical diseases (OCPD); and to examine whether ACEs are associated with disease-related characteristics among children with arthritis...
Pleasure Verses: A Five Element Set
American Quarterly2019-03-01
I offer five pleasure verses, which I define as nuanced expressions on a joypain continuum that emerge from collective work which SWINGS SLAPS and SUFFOCATES the status quo. These pleasure verses exemplify Midwestern erotic aesthetics of cold double negatives and I-will-show-you-how-I-heard-us pedagogies of impossibilities transformed by collective work that continually and continuously remakes Black girlhood through practice as praxis.
Doing Digital Wrongly
American Quarterly2018-09-03
In this multimedia essay, we explore doing digital wrongly as a music-making process rooted in Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a collective space of organizing with Black girls to celebrate Black girlhood. Using first-person narrative, reflection, and photography, our essay is arranged as a story of an incoherent collective that highlights a litany of listening practices and responses to our personal lives and participation in SOLHOT, and how music becomes an iteration of how we worked together.
Mentoring on the Borderlands: Creating Empowering Connections Between Adolescent Girls and Young Women Volunteers
Human ArchitectureThis article focuses on the ways young women volunteers build empowering connections with sixth grade girls in the context of a girl empowerment mentoring program.
Staging Black Girl Utopias: A Sweetwater Tribute
Departures in Critical Qualitative Research2015 This performative text places in conversation the work of Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a practice of black girlhood celebration, with Robin M. Boylorn's Sweetwater. Both SOLHOT's archive of original poetry, movement, and music and Boylorn's Sweetwater document the power and potential of listening to and being transformed by black women and girls' truths.
