Scholarship
February 2023 cover of Comparative Education Review’s special issue on Black Lives Matter and Global Struggles for Racial Justice in Education.
This article employs critical policy ethnography to argue that racial capitalism shapes transnational policy borrowing and to illustrate that a perceived portability of marketized reforms rests on racialized notions of the function of schooling for marginalized youth across contexts. It focuses on a controversial 2018 provincial amendment in South Africa’s Western Cape that introduced “collaboration schools,” public-private partnerships modeled on charter schools from the United States and academy schools from the United Kingdom.
Commentary
Installation view of Wangechi Mutu’s the seated i, (2019) on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Photo by Bruce Schwarz.
Monuments as Worldmaking: The Limits of Breaking the Bronze Ceiling
Cultured Mag 2021
Cultured Writers Grant winner Amelia Simone Herbert explores the recently reimagined role of Black women in monuments and the worldmaking they encourage.
Swing Low: A Visual Metaphor for Abolition Now
CRWNMAG, 2020
Alison Saar’s Harlem statue of Harriet Tubman is a testament to the Black feminist imagination - a force that has led to the current global push towards police and prison abolition.
Poetry
Four of Amelia’s poems appear in the Spring 2021 issue of A Gathering Together. AGT publishes works that simultaneously transcend and address the moment they speak from, works that will last beyond the creator’s last breath and still be relevant, and/or works that put the writer and reader in conversation with the intellectual thought of Ancestors of all kinds.
Amelia’s poem “Black Exodus” is featured in Black Lives Have Always Mattered, an anthology of essays, personal narratives, poetry and prose that challenges readers to confront long-held values and beliefs about black lives, as well as white privilege and fragility, as it surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and its persistence of structural inequality.