Norma Watson

J. Norma Watson is an PhD Candidate in the Departments of History and African American & Diaspora Studies. She earned her B.A. in Spanish Studies from Dominican University and an M.A. in History from Penn State. As a graduate student, Norma co-organized the interdisciplinary conference “Black Experiences in the Wider Atlantic: Approaches, Methods, & the Archive, 16th–21st Centuries,” for which she received the Graduate Alliance for Diversity and Inclusion Service Award. Norma is an interdisciplinary scholar of colonial and modern Latin America who studies Black space and placemaking. Her research integrates methods of oral history, Black Feminist frameworks, social history, and close readings of Black newspaper articles, laws, and essays by Black community intellectuals.

Norma’s dissertation, “Memory as Resistance: Oral History of Education in São Paulo’s Movimento Negro” explores how Afro-Brazilians in São Paulo created fugitive counter-educational spaces to cultivate communal reflection, historical consciousness, social critique, and Black pride in the 20th century. The oral history project she utilize for her project is titled The Trajectory of Black Paulistano and was collected in 1988 for the centennial celebration of abolition in Brazil. The interviews center the experiences of Black militants, mothers, teachers, and community intellectuals in spaces across the city of São Paulo. She juxtapose oral histories of three generations of AfroBrazilian organizing to locate intersections of resistance strategies in Black São Paulo rooted in community, youth, and education. By using oral histories and employing a Black U.S. and AfroBrazilian Feminist lens on intimacy, her work identifies more contributions by Black women, students, community intellectuals, and the narratives of those who have been overlooked in the history of Black resistance. Centering lived experiences, intersectional identities, and oral histories, she argue that counter-educational spaces operated as sites of race-based organizing and communal archives sustained throughout the Black movement in Brazil. She engages the questions: (1) How did different generations’ use of education illustrate their engagement with legacies of state-sanctioned violence? (2) How did AfroBrazilian communities use fugitive counter-educational spaces during periods of democratic government and military dictatorship to cultivate political consciousness and intellectual discourse? (3) And what continuities can be traced between AfroBrazilian intimate counter-educational practices to national commemoration through oral histories?

Norma is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation dissertation fellow, and her research has been supported by CLR James Research Fellowship, The Black Brown and Queer+ Fellowship, Penn State’s Africana Research Center, and Humanities Institute, and more.