About The CBP

 

The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis is an experimental multidisciplinary research incubator and arts co-working hub, archival nexus, and creative transmedia studio based at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, in Tkaronto Canada.

The CBP gathers transnational cultural workers, educators, researchers, artists, students, activists, and system-impacted community members to think collaboratively and respond creatively in loving concern for the genre-defying performance of Black life, study, and cultural memory work.

Our work is grounded in Black Studies, Black aesthetic practice, African Indigenous and Afrodiasporic cultural technologies, and the traditions of relation, survival, invention, and worldmaking that Black communities have long carried despite borders, languages, archives, and forms.

Mission & Mandate

The CBP foregrounds the study and making of Black life, Black cultural memory, Black trans and diasporic aesthetics, migrant technocultures, and collective practices of otherwise worldmaking. It exists in service of all Black people, Black study, Black Studies, Black aesthetic practice, Black cultural memory, and the liberatory practices that make our lives and relations possible.

The CBP Studio / Lab

The CBP emerged from Smythe’s recruitment to the Faculty of Information beginning in 2021 and from a need for Black Studies infrastructure that could hold research, performance, sound, publishing, archives, pedagogy, community relation, and student development together. Since 2022, the lab has developed through changing teams, fellowships, workshops, reading and writing groups, publications, research-creation projects, public programmes, and partnerships. Its history is neither a smooth institutional success story nor the work of one person alone. It is a record of experimentation, constraint, care, conflict, improvisation, and the many forms of labour through which people have helped the space become usable. 

We use the compound term “StudioLab” or “studio/lab” to refer to our physical space, currently housed within the University of Toronto. As a research lab, the CBP research team develops questions, methods, publications, grants, and creative professional/academic training. As a creative studio, the CBP makes room for rehearsal, sound, performance, image, writing, and material experiments for all creative professional, students, information/technology professionals, and especially community relations without specific titles or professions but whos ancestral and present cultural attachments ground our work and study. As an archival nexus, the digital and physical platforms produced and/or maintained within the CBP attend to records, metadata, custody, refusal, public memory, and the traces left behind for the preservation of Black life and the lives and studies of the dispossessed. Studio/Lab conveys the flexible sincerity and the both/and potential of our work.

Land Acknowledgment

The CBP gathers in Tkaronto, across lands and waters shaped by Indigenous sovereignty, treaty relations, forced migration, Black presence, labour, and refusal. Our acknowledgements are a sustained practice of remembering where we are, how we arrived, what institutions obscure, and what kinds of relation we are responsible for maintaining with the stewards of this land.

Guiding Principles

Black poiēsis · an ethics of pace · transnationalism · trans liberation · Black and Indigenous freedom dreams · collectivity and community. 

These principles guide how we gather, publish, archive, study, support one another, and decide what should remain public, internal, restricted, delayed, or refused.

The Collaborative Book of Practice

The Collaborative Book of Practice is the CBP’s living lab manual. It gathers the values, commitments, protocols, reflections, and everyday practices that sustain our work, ourselves, and our principled relations. This public-facing version explains our ethos, programmes, access practices, and ways of working and studying together.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What do we do?

The CBP supports research, editorial work, public programmes, cultural gatherings, archival stewardship, publication, student mentorship, and community-rooted collaboration. Our work includes recurring study and maker sessions, public cultural heritage events, creative/technocultural literacy workshops, artist and cultural-worker collaborations, zines/policy/folio publications, digital archival projects, collaborative and community-led research initiatives, and other experimental forms of Black Studies practices and aesthetic interventions across interrelated/dynamic traditions.

We are building networks, undertaking collaborative projects, and orienting our individual and collective work toward a transformed public invested in what Katherine McKittrick calls “black livingness.” Our two primary goals are to 1) enrich and expand the public infrastructure of Black Studies, arts, archives and education, and 2) to transform the conditions of study and of life of a people rendered as both data and as “unthought” by gathering our own information, and deepening material awareness of worlds and traditions that have been disregarded or left unattended or in states of disrepair.

The CBP is physically located in Tkaronto, a meeting place for many Indigenous and radical traditions of Black study, Black life, liberation struggle, and creative organisation. We often physically and financially work from within the University of Toronto while remaining accountable to forms of Black study, Black cultural work, and community relations that must exceed the university. Our goal is to enrich and expand the public infrastructure of Black Studies, arts, archives, and education across Canada, Turtle Island, and transnationally.

Poet, teacher, and activist June Jordan referred to Black Studies as “Life Studies” We understand Black Studies in this spirit: more than academic field, but as a practice of study, care, relation, and transformation. At the CBP, black poiēsis is a method and a material commitment. It helps us ask what Black study can build, preserve, unsettle, repair, and imagine otherwise.

More than an understanding of poetry as craft, black poiēsis names the creative production of what is “more than.” It refer to the making of forms, methods, gatherings, archives, performances, publications, and relations that refuse limits imposed by racial capitalism, colonialism, ableism, xenophobia, transphobia, class violence, and carceral power. The CBP privileges the multiplicity of traditions ushered forth by black poiēsis and poetics as a shared foundation for organising our relations with loving precision and care.