Guest Editor’s Introduction

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.

Soft Animal Heart

What does it mean to create familial bonds between humans and animals? Do love, mourning, and empathy matter less if they are directed toward nonhuman animals? This narrative-driven essay explores the nuances of loss during a widely precarious year, and the ways families are created and dissolved through mourning, while also addressing the socially fraught history of the “witchy cat lady.” The author, a full-spectrum doula who had previously specialized in stillbirth support, argues that empathy may offer a heightened version of itself when it demands communicating across a species difference.

Bad Feelings

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.

Writing Ourselves into Existence

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.

Home-Schooling in David Makes Man

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.

My Self-Decolonizing Story as a Colonize(d)(r) Canarian Scholar/Worm

As a researcher in the United States, I became a diasporic colonize(d)(r) scholar—a colonized colonizer subject. In order to understand my camino and self-decolonize, I undertake an autoethnographic process to scrutinize my identity within the history of oppression, connivance, and resistance of Canary Islanders. I unpack my gaze as a colonized subject from the Canary Islands who, like her ancestors, participates in colonizing land and people elsewhere. This essay offers an embodied reflection that enriches decolonizing studies and contributes to decolonizing academia.

Memorializing Pulse

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.

Black and Blue

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.