Welcome to “In Theory and In Practice: A Black Girl Thesis”

I’m Anna…a mama, wife, scholar, community builder, and “leadher” navigating all of the worlds and roles I encompass as a Black woman.

Growing up, my father would often go around commenting on how one person or the other “had book sense but no common sense.” At the time, I didn’t know he was giving me a life framework, that knowledge lives in books and in bodies, in classrooms and in kitchens, in theory and in the rhythm of everyday life. It was not just important to be “traditionally smart” and well-read, getting your knowledge from all of the greatest writers, philosophers and theorists in the world, but that the lessons of life - coming from your environment, your community, your lived experiences, were just as if not more valuable. It was the marriage of the two that truly made you a whole person. Patricia Hill Collins’ (one of my fave sista scholars) Black Feminist Thought mirrors this as one of the components is lived experience as criterion for meaning.

This space is born from that belief, the marriage between theory and lived life, between scholarship and practice, between what I’ve studied and what I know in my bones.

I love to read and consume ideas. But I also believe knowledge shouldn’t stay trapped on the page. It should breathe, move, stretch, and meet real life. This space is where I let it do exactly that. I hope you’ll join me as I navigate living my life in theory and in practice.

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