Six-Week Seminar · Cohort 01
Black Women on Social Problems
The course I've taught in a university classroom, brought to a room that's for us. Six weeks on the systems shaping our lives: white supremacy, anti-Blackness, patriarchy, capitalism, and heteronormativity.
Why this seminar
The things you've carried alone were never yours to carry alone.
Most of us learned to explain our own lives in individual terms, not resilient enough, not disciplined enough, not healed enough. This seminar starts from a different premise. The patterns in our health, our finances, our relationships, and our sense of self are produced by systems, not shortcomings. Once you can see the system, you can respond to it differently.
You want a real intellectual community. You're comfortable with dense reading and ready to sit with ideas that don't resolve in one sitting.
A self-help course or a passive video series. You'll read real texts and talk about them, live, with other Black women doing the same work.
How it works
Built for people with full lives
A short primer
A brief recap to open each session, grounding the week's reading before discussion begins.
90 minutes, live
The heart of the seminar. Real-time discussion held with the group, not a webinar you watch alone.
A digital library
Reading notes, guiding questions, and a private community Slack to keep the conversation going.
The syllabus
Six weeks, one throughline
Each week builds on the last. You'll leave with more than a concept, you'll leave with a way of reading your own life.
Social Problems & Systems of Oppression
The foundational lens: how to tell the difference between a personal problem and a produced one.
Identities & the Intersectional Lens
Reading identity as something done to us and through us, not just held individually.
Health Disparities & Wellbeing
The stress, the coping, the cost, and the language most of us were never given for any of it.
Wealth & Capital
What the wealth gap actually is, mechanically, and where individual financial advice runs out.
Community Care & Collective Action
Moving from insight to response. What care looks like when it isn't carried alone.
Imagination & Next Steps
Bringing all five weeks together, and asking what you build from here.
Your instructor
Breanna D. Brock, PhD
Sociologist · Stony Brook University
I spent years in a PhD program studying ethnoracial identity, discrimination, and wellbeing, and I learned early that the classroom is one of the few places people actually get language for what they've already lived. I'm a first-generation college graduate, so I know what it means to sit in a room and finally hear someone name something you'd only ever felt. Let's sit in that together, outside the ivory tower.
Join the cohort
What's included
- • Six live 90-minute discussion sessions via Zoom
- • A digital library of readings and reading notes
- • Guiding questions delivered before each session
- • A private community Slack for the length of the cohort
- • Direct access to your instructor throughout