Unpacking How Black Haircare Builds Community, Holds Memories, and Tells Stories

Cienna Davis, an upcoming doctoral graduate of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, centers her art and research on a technology Black women have always used to build community: haircare.

Davis came to Annenberg from Berlin, where she spent years building Soul Sisters Berlin, a feminist collective of Black women and femmes making space for themselves in a city that is often an alienating place. Her organizing work in Berlin revolved around touch, she says, whether through haircare sessions, public gatherings, or collaborative art projects.

Her research, which stems from her years as an organizer, argues that touch, specifically Black haircare, is a form of technology just as powerful as any other. “I look at Black haircare practices as their own digital technologies, focusing on the actual physicality of the hands as a digit,” she says. “It's a digital-like mechanism that allows us to exchange information, to build connections, and to connect to our histories and memories.”

From Organizing to Academia

When Davis arrived at Annenberg in 2020, she thought she knew what she wanted to study. Black feminist organizing online had surged in visibility over the recent years, and she came to Penn with a plan to examine it seriously.

But she pivoted: “The more that I studied social media platforms and the political economy behind them, the less that I wanted to center them as the space where Black feminist organizing has its most meaningful and productive work,” she says. 

Instead, she drew inspiration from her time in Berlin. Haircare, she recalled, kept surfacing in her organizing, often as an entry point for newer members, and she decided to explore that.

The result is her dissertation "Dreading the Diaspora: Black Hair Technology and the Textures of Connection," which situates Black haircare alongside oral traditions, music, and other cultural practices that scholars have long recognized as vehicles for diasporic connection, as well as contemporary technologies like social media.

“While technological innovation in the Western imagination is dominated by notions of speed, convenience, and efficiency, monetizing social relations and lauding posthumanist futures, my research asks what alternative futures can we envision when we prioritize the slowness, interconnection, and intergenerational knowledge transmission of Indigenous technologies,” she says.

Building A Research Agenda

At Penn, Davis has drawn deeply from the programming and intellectual community of the Center for Experimental Ethnography, co-directed by Penn Provost John L. Jackson, Jr., former dean of the Annenberg School, and Professor Deborah A. Thomas of Penn Anthropology, both members of her dissertation committee. 

One class formative in developing her research agenda was the Center-affiliated course, “Sighting Black Girlhood,” taught by Thomas and Associate Professor Grace L. Sanders Johnson of Africana Studies. During the class, Penn students collaborated with visual artists and students in Philadelphia, Jamaica, and South Africa, and engaged with work at The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia. This experience that tied art and academia inspired Davis to pursue multimodal research: “It was really encouraging to think that the type of work that I do within my community is not just a thing that I'm playing around with — it's part of how I'm theorizing. It gave me space to explore that more concretely,” she says.

Davis also cites Professor Guobin Yang's course, “The Performance Society,” as crucial to shaping her research. “The course introduced performance as a method for me for the first time. It was eye-opening,” she says.

Art as Research

In 2024, Davis began working on “(Digit)al Dread” — a collaborative film with artists Zé de Paiva, Nasheeka Nedsreal, and Sonia Barrett — that explores how Black women in Berlin navigate their relationships with their hair and identity.

“The film itself became a way of practicing the argument of the dissertation,” Davis says. For the film, she did street interviews with Black women she encountered in Berlin: approaching them and starting conversations about their hair. 

These encounters eventually developed into a workshop for Black women on hair, bringing them together in a space to learn how to care for their hair and practice on one another. “Black hair itself became a method through which I was able to recruit participants in this workshop,” she says.

Davis screened the film at the Transnational Feminist Networks Symposium, a two-day event that provided a platform for collaborative, multimodal scholarship. The symposium, organized by Davis and a collective of feminist scholars at Annenberg, brought together scholars, artists, and activists to explore how transnational feminist networks communicate, create culture, critique, and imagine new ways of feminist solidarity and connection.

Organizing the symposium and an art exhibit that complemented it — “Present Futures: Experiments in Feminist Futurity” — was a way to “showcase the value of creative forms and multimodality to knowledge production,” Davis says. The artwork in the exhibition explored feminist networks and solidarities from across the globe, whose work mirrored her years in Berlin.

What’s Next

As Davis determines her next steps, she draws on lessons learned from her time at Annenberg and Penn. She's excited for the journey, whether it takes her to a classroom, a theater, a museum, or somewhere else entirely.

"More than anything, I enjoy community spaces and what can be created within them. Because once you have those spaces, you never know what will emerge from them,” she says. “Being involved in organizing, creating, and curating programming that brings people together is more important to me than any singular creative project.”