ABSTRACT
This collaboratively written chapter contains critical narrative reflections from each co-author about how they came to work for the African American Digital Humanities initiative and how they left that work. The end of the authors’ service to the AADHum project brings the lesson of how, in the absence of intentionality, it is possible to retain funding but impossible to sustain a community. Collectively, as we process our own success, growth, and learning, we searched for concepts to help us understand the project’s legacy as connected to the complicated histories of Black creatives, Black justice thinkers, and Black criticism, leading us to a Blues epistemology. Together, we offer a way of thinking of integrity-driven grant-funded projects through a lens of strategic assembly and disassembly in the face of changing opportunity structures and power relations.
