Marcia Chatelain, "Teaching in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter: Social Media, Social Justice, and Social Change in Classrooms and Communities"

Marcia Chatelain is associate professor of history and African-American Studies at Georgetown University.  Her first book, South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration (Duke University Press, 2015) examines the ways in which African-American’s women’s outreach to girls constructed Black girlhood during the dynamic changes of the Great Migration period, and it argues that girlhood was a contested ideological space in which African-Americans grappled with anxieties and hopes for the period.  Her second book project, Burgers in the Age of Black Capitalism: Race, Civil Rights, and Fast Food in America explores the ways in which dining culture shaped African-American protest, entrepreneurship and activism in the 20th century.  Burgers in the Age of Black Capitalism engages visual representations of African-American consumers in advertising in the post-Civil Rights era to understand the relationship between the politicized marketplace and a long history of struggle.  In 2014, she launched the #FergusonSyllabus initiative to encourage educators to devote the first day of classes to teaching about the national crisis in Ferguson, Missouri.