Hotter Than July: The Radical Promise of Community Wisdom and Black Queer Worldmaking in Detroit

Community advocates, scholars, and global social justice activists often undervalue the knowledge produced in marginalized, minoritized, and subjugated subaltern communities, diminishing the efficacy of equity-focused interventions and inhibiting collective work. This thesis articulates and theorizes the concept of community wisdom as an uncharted technology of knowledge production. Similarly, the literature review illuminates comparable concepts noted as subjugated and resistant knowledges which are distinctive to those oppressed by societal structures of power and privilege. As such, an argument locates resilience, agency, and resistance as constitutive attributes essential to how marginality intuitively devises strategies to survive and sometimes thrive as outsiders, sometimes referenced as deviants, in Western society. Hence, Hotter Than July: The Radical Promise of Community Wisdom and Black Queer Worldmaking in Detroit centers on the lived experiences and survival praxis of Black queer-identified people in Detroit by employing grounded theory methodology to examine and identify its point(s) of resonance. Thus, this research seeks to theorize the concept of community wisdom, identify where the technology is located within Detroit’s Black queer community; and articulate its relevance to critical social and justice theories; and applicability with the local to global social justice movement. By examining these inquiries, community wisdom provides an opportunity to renovate long-standing organizing archetypes by increasing recognition and respect for the capacity of subjugated knowledges to generate radical possibilities and promises from the margins.