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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

Pleasure Verses: A Five Element Set

Doing Digital Wrongly

Mentoring on the Borderlands: Creating Empowering Connections Between Adolescent Girls and Young Women Volunteers

Staging Black Girl Utopias: A Sweetwater Tribute

This volume examines how Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths, or SOLHOT, a radical youth intervention, provides a space for the creative performance and expression of Black girlhood and how this creativity informs other realizations about Black girlhood and womanhood. 

Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood

Wish to Live: The Hip-hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader (Educational Psychology)

Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy (Mediated Youth)

Disrupting Qualitative Inquiry: Possibilities and Tensions in Educational Research (Critical Qualitative Research)

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).

Political Science

African Studies

African American Studies

Black Girlhood

Faculty Profile - Ruth Nicole Brown

MSU African American and African studies seeks “technologies of living for survival into wellness"

Reading up on race? Here are more than 30 Michigan authors to check out

Collectively Building Anew: The Department of African American and African Studies

Professor and the Inaugural Chairperson

This work was produced by the group Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) and is being used to promote Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood, a book by Ruth Nicole Brown. The book is about the innovative organization SOLHOT, which is a creative space for the performance of radically new interpretations of Black girls' lived experiences.

Young Girl Lyrics

First Verse-Written and performed by Shasta Klevah Knox

I see it too often
Ladies be lost in
these slanted rooms
With damaged views
they be forced in
a world when the mind is undermined and the body's more important
And placed before men for enjoyment ...
Poison
Neva trust a big butt & smile
See these women learn they role and they drive these brothers wild
All the while, being singled out for livin' out these double standards
Now little Ambers spreading rumors like cancer to Hannahs 'bout Amandas but can careless what a man does...
It's time that women stand up instead of reprimand us, and
take the energy you put into instagram into ya grammar, use ya voice..let em see you deeper than that camera
Cause everything aint black and white 
and everything aint sepia
I see rainbows every angle of the spectrum
Now paint paint a picture with your imperfections
& hang 'em in these slanted rooms to be viewed by the collective.

Hook/Chorus
Young girl, this ya world too
Young girl, you should gon' express ya truth
2X
What's yo potential, put it in a pencil
2X
& Tell em how u feel tell em how u feel
2X

Second Verse-Written and performed by Tierney T.R.U.T.H. Reed

Gallery of creativity, but nowhere to display
too much hate, we get defaced, so we choose to turn away
(But naw) Not today, your canvas is where your standing
whether street corner or campus, girl just keep advancin'
Don't change you, when dem dark clouds hover
uncover your true potential & switch that watercolor
Suffer? Why? Your imagination's contagious
creations can adorn the blankest pages
Even heal a nation that's tainted Black faces, from lack of salvation,
gurl time is wasting, so emerge w/ ideas ears neva heard
Submerge words & show da true potential of a Black girl, word

Video credits:

Music
Tierney T.R.U.T. H. Reed
Shasta "Klevah" Knox
Porshe Garner
Terry Cole
Onyema Grace
Eric Surreal
Danitra Pope
Kate Manoucheka Anastasie Airey

Models
Jessica
Porshe
Nataysia
Niecy
Maya Sanaa
Malayah
Jelly
Shasta
Tierney
Meme
Kristen 

Video Production
Jayda Thompson (Director)
Jayvien and Rayshaun (Assistants)

Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood, by Ruth Nicole Brown

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