Publications & Resources
Our publications and resources gather the CBP’s public-facing research, creative-political publishing/media initiatives, teaching materials, reading guides, toolkits, and archival/resource projects.
Sankofa Currents
Sankofa Currents is CBP’s journal and is published through Field Notes & Folios. It supports experimental, interdisciplinary, and community-engaged scholarship, creative work, interviews, field notes, and public reflection. The page should link to current and past issues with clear dates, titles, and access notes.
Field Notes imprint
Field Notes & Folios is CBP’s publishing platform for zines, chapbooks, handmade books, artist publications, archival dossiers, field reports, toolkits, and small-run print/digital outputs. It expands publication beyond conventional academic form while keeping credit, permissions, accessibility, and archive copies visible.
The Collaborative Book of Practice
The Blackprint
Reading Guides & Community Syllabi
CBP Core Reading List — Black Poiēsis & Black Study
A starter list for anyone new to the intellectual and creative traditions CBP is in conversation with:
- Aimé Césaire — Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
- Audre Lorde — The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (1977)
- Saidiya Hartman — Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
- Sylvia Wynter — “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”
- Fred Moten — In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
- Édouard Glissant — Poetics of Relation
- June Jordan — “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America”
- Alice Coltrane — Lord of Lords (1973)
Reading List —
Workshop & Courses
[magnitude + bond] Reading Group Syllabus
Each semester, [magnitude + bond] develops a reading list centered on a particular question or thematic thread.
You must register for the event in order to access the reading material.
Black Studies & the Archive — Community Syllabus
A public-facing companion to the graduate course, including foundational readings on archives, custody, Black cultural memory, and diasporic aesthetics.
The reading material is available on the course page.
Toolkits, Folios & Zines
This page gathers practical guides, small publications, workshop outputs, archival tools, and future Field Notes materials. It can include resources connected to archives, freedom libraries, people-over-profit parties, preservation, public scholarship, and community-based study.
COMING SOON
CBP x Arts Jamaica Archives / Reading Room
This resource profile introduces CBP’s collaboration with Arts Jamaica Archives and the developing Reading Room.
Materials will be shared only when permissions, licensing, description, and stewardship conditions are clear.
COMING SOON
Shared Horizons
Shared Horizons: The Politics and Poetics of Transnational Abolition is a digital archival platform and research initiative co-led by SA Smythe and Vanessa Thompson.
Courses
This page gathers courses related to CBP themes, including Black Custody, Trans Technē, Culture & Technology Studio II, and Black Studies & the Archive at UofT. List term, instructor, institution, short description, and whether the course is current, past, or forthcoming.
Black Custody
Instructor: Prof. SA Smythe
School: Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2025
“Black Custody” moves from the premise that custody of any kind cannot be thought without blackness and indigeneity, related marginalised communities and their creative practices. The seminar (INF3105H – Black Custody) critically engages destructive influences of policing that hold communities and their knowledges “in custody.” Grounded in the transformative poetic and political relationship between definitions of “custody,” we examine the intricacies between custodial systems, networks of guardianship, and resource preservation. Unraveling the complexities and historical contexts inherent in various modes of care work—which is also to say, curation—we will deepen our understanding of the profundity of care, guardianship, and representation in sociocultural and geopolitical spheres.
Black Studies & The Archive
Instructor: Prof. SA Smythe
School: Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
Offered: Winter 2025
This seminar (INF2123H – Black Studies and the Archive) engages material, cultural, and metaphorical instances of “the archive” and archival imaginaries pertaining to Black life and Black study. We will examine “archival turns” across various genealogies and intellectual formations for any methodological insights regarding liberation, recollection, and repair. Further, we will reflect on the capacity of Black study to both anchor and rupture our responses to Western hermeneutics and archival practices via three organizing questions: “Who curates and owns what archive(s) and which archives own us?” “What is (im)possible with(out) the archive?” and “What to the displaced, the drowned, and otherwise dispossessed is an archive (now)?”
Culture & Technology Studio II
Instructor: Prof. SA Smythe
School: Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
Offered: Winter 2025
This project-based course (INF1512H – Culture & Technology Studio II) will serve as the keystone experience for the C&T concentration. In this course, students will develop a detailed proposal and plan for an individual creative-scholarly project relating to the digital contemporary, then execute their plan. Students might produce work in a wide range of media including podcasts, art installations, digital stories, textile fabrications, physical computing projects, games, books and/or publications, creative non-fiction or essay writing, poetry, fiction, and inter-artistic or inter-disciplinary creations. Sessions will be devoted to mutually supportive co-working in a studio environment and to peer and instructor feedback. The students will work together (in consultation with the instructor) to curate and design in an exhibition and/or showcase of projects to complete the course.
The course will also address the demands of hands-on studio work by incorporating project management skills including prototyping, iteration, and process documentation.
Trans Technē
Instructor: Prof. SA Smythe
School: Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2025
This postgraduate seminar gathers ecologies of thought, techne, technologies, and for trans life and what Katherine McKittrick calls “black livingness” Each session foregrounds an aspect of cultural production including artefacts, performance, community coalitions, literary texts, and archival formations. It stages a conversation between “borders and transitions,” “liberation and emancipation,” “identification and identity,” “atmospheres and imaginaries,” “pronouns and prefixes” (e.g. the “non” in nonbinary), “rights and autonomy,” “racial logics and colonial grammars,” and “poetics and practices.” Our study also encounters legal writing and public policy; ethnography; black studies, performance; historiography; critical theory; dominant archives and technologies of dispossession. Informed by interventions from those most impacted by a nexus of violence, we will produce creative work and practical propositions that develop collaborative critical responses using transmedia and transdisciplinary tools for navigating the present political conjuncture.
Abolition Open School
Instructor: Prof. SA Smythe, Melissa Maceyko, Alex Villalpando, Maywa Montenegro, and Erin Debenport.
School: Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
Offered: Fall 2020, Winter 2021 (Second Fridays of each month)
The Abolition Open School is a Cops Off Campus collaboration between abolitionist groups working across the California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) systems who seek to build shared knowledge of abolitionist principles with our communities. This is an experimental yearlong series of conversations, debates, and interviews with activists, artists, scholars, and all others impacted by the carceral state, colonialism, and racial capitalism. Collectively, we seek to explore the history, necessity, and shared horizon of abolition in an accessible way for those both familiar with and new to abolitionist strategies and practices.
Tkaronto, Dish With One Spoon
Copyright 2024, Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis