This essay is an autoethnographic account of the ways Black cultural performance, specifically Black social dance, works to produce and maintain Black cultural space in predominantly white spaces. I consider the significance of the “City Boy Wit It” song and dance as an expression of Black identity that marks Blackness in Tampa, FL. By framing my personal experiences through a discussion of Black identity and Black space, I critically examine larger issues of Black performativity and Black cultural spaces.

Through a collection of personal narratives, members of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSD) community share how they navigate their lives in the aftermath of a school shooting that spawned marches in Washington, DC, and nationwide organizing surrounding gun violence. MSD activism exists beyond conventional political means and the work of healing the community continues in other forums. While the names and faces of student activists are easily recognizable, in this piece readers will encounter largely overlooked voices, as attention deservedly went to student activists, hearing from adults who live, teach, work, and parent in and around Parkland, FL.

This essay offers a layered account of professional wrestling training in Florida in the months surrounding both WrestleMania 36 and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. These events draw attention to the necessity of performing bodies in the production of professional wrestling shows and the compounded somatic risks implicit in carrying out such performances. I situate the wrestler’s laboring body as a primary site of production, complicated by the risk of sharing the wrestling ring amid calls for social distancing.

This essay explores the logic of capitalism that shapes the experiences of a precarious Black Miami teen in the OWN television series David Makes Man . Analyzing seven episodes of the first season, we develop the concept of home-schooling to describe hustlin’ as a capitalist logic operating within Florida public housing and meritocracy as a capitalist logic celebrated at an elite magnet school to reveal imaginative possibilities of survival in Miami. In this essay, we engage the circuit of culture to interrogate issues of racialized-class in the television series and within a broader social context.

Since 2016, the city of Orlando, FL, has remembered the Pulse nightclub massacre through memorial projects honoring the victims and survivors. The process of remembering and memorializing trauma is contentious; debates over how, where, who, and what to remember are about emotions, economics, and politics. Knowing that meaning making and memory are ongoing processes, I use the circuit of culture model to navigate my city’s processes and places of memorializing by visiting and interpreting different sites of memory. I argue for the power of the vernacular memorial, rather than the state-sanctioned, as a more inclusive, living form of memory.

This essay engages the activism of Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau, along with Black feminist cultural productions such as the 2019 song “Almeda” by Solange and Melina Matsoukas’s 2019 film Queen and Slim , to offer a cimarrona approach for practicing Florida study. The cimarrona is a rebellious being who can lead us to apply a radical lens for understanding life, freedom struggles, and death in Florida—one that underscores the refusal of Blackness, which we can understand as a form of fugitivity. I argue that these Black feminist works evoke Florida as a Black Atlantic site and freedom route.

Growing up in Florida as a queer subject, I bounced from disaster to disaster. The annual hurricane season reminds me of this vulnerability, despite my racial and class privilege to background my precarity. Through reflection, the hurricane brings me home. In this autoethnography of queer survival, I approach identity disclosure as a process of negotiation and regulation. With ecological and queer temporalities, I explore the elemental interconnections of identity, space, and time. Further, the concept of queer ecological temporality expands the present moment to encompass disasters both past and future in an era of political and climate uncertainty.

This mystory explores alienation in a law enforcement family and anti-racist allyship after the 2012 murder of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. Situated within key circuit of culture moments of identity and representation, I use the popular song “What It Means” by Drive-By Truckers (2016) and my personal experience to address whiteness. Colorblindness and fragility are twin components of whiteness in post-racial America that animate alienation and allyship. Both embodied analyses of pop culture and personal experience describe white identity and white privilege at the interpersonal and intercultural level.

Research indicates that Disney theme parks function as sites of ideological negotiation. This study builds on the research by examining Disney World’s incorporation of its first avowed Latina princess, Elena of Avalor . Bringing together discourses of Latinidad, theme parks, and media, this essay focuses on how the park incorporates Elena into its landscape at the level of production, representation, and audiences. I argue that Disney’s inclusion of Elena, and by extension Latinidad, is malleable, situated within the geographic setting, and dependent on various factors seldom disclosed by the conglomerate. Ultimately, Elena exists as an outsider within the Disney park universe.

Through centering the Florida Panhandle and using MTV’s Floribama Shore as an entry point, this essay articulates a Floridian-Southern identity. We organize this project around three themes that are heavily present in both Floribama Shore and our personal experiences as Floridian-Southerners: intra-regional tensions around religion, gender performances, and reproductive politics. Through layering our experiences among vignettes from Floribama Shore , we make visible the relationship between the consumption of popular media, the representations of Floridian-Southerners in popular media, the social and cultural regulation of hegemonic Southern deportment, and our own Floridian-Southern identity.

Florida is a site of critical inquiry and figures prominently in the US American imaginary. The Sunshine State sets the stage for broader conversations about cultural difference, climate change, and participatory democracy. Contributors to this special issue apply the canonical circuit of culture model to address the interrelated nature of culture and power. They provide methodologically thick, fleshy interpretive analyses that privilege experiential, experimental, and embodied approaches to take seriously Florida cultural politics, people, and popular forms.

Reflecting on new materialisms and performance, the author uses autoethnography to link his bodily experience with the materiality of wool (including a childhood friend’s flock of sheep, yarn as a man who crochets, and his dead father’s coat) to a spontaneous, prereflective decision to “lean in” to one of Joseph Beuys’s felt suits on display in a museum.

The essays in this Critical Intervention forum continue work on posthumanism in performance studies where the elemental performance tools of body, word, and thing activate studies in materialism, vital materialities, and engagement with non/human others. Through methods of performative writing, these works assist in deepening our potential to understand the intersections of art, materiality, and political intervention.

Focusing on our interactions with visual art as posthuman performance, this piece explores how Jane Bennett’s “vibrant materiality” moves us into a radical relationality with art and processes of grief. Performance studies’ enduring plumb into the deep ecology of body-page-body-stage makes us particularly equipped to see what else we might know of being in semantic-somatic multimatter knowing.

In this article, I utilize phenomenologically-based creative nonfiction to present a case study of what micro-protest looks like for an African American faculty member working in a predominantly white university. Drawing from observations and informal information-gathering techniques over a 20+ year period, I present a layered account to share snippets from a larger narrative that vividly capture the nuanced ways co-cultural group members navigate predominantly white organizational spaces in the margins. Ultimately, I introduce the various ways micro-protest—as a new conceptualization of co-cultural practice—is enacted to achieve the preferred outcome of separation. I conclude with a brief discussion of how this scholarly endeavor contributes to co-cultural research and theorizing.

Academia can be a hostile environment for Black women. Our research team leveraged Black feminist research praxis to produce new knowledge countering conceptions of Black women students and faculty as people who are unintelligent, produce superfluous work, and worthy of being ignored. In order to locate spaces for healing, mentorship, and validation, we engaged in a collaborative autoethnography to co-narrate our experiences while conducting a study for, by, and about Black women. Re-purposing tools from Black feminist thought, critical autoethnography, and collaborative autoethnography enabled us to write ourselves into existence, countering damaging narratives and subverting the harm inflicted by the institution.

This essay explores what I describe as “bad feelings” in the field and the research process. Combining autoethnography with feminist and queer methods, I counter the stigma around trauma and feelings of shame and fear in research. I ask what happens when the researcher experiences bad feelings that recall past lived trauma, and that challenge their sense of safety and security. In addition, I consider what it means for researchers to feel bad about their research. I argue that feeling one’s research, and thinking through and with bad feelings, opens up the possibility to “accidentally fall” into productive, and perhaps, alternative issues of study.