About

Brittney Cooper is an Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University in 2009, along with an M.A. from Emory in 2007. She also holds bachelor's degrees in English and Political Science from Howard University, earned in 2002. Her work focuses extensively on Black women's intellectual history, Black feminist thought, and race and gender politics in hip hop and popular culture. She is currently completing her first book, Race Women: Gender and the Making of a Black Public Intellectual Tradition, 1892-Present. Cooper has published articles on hip hop feminism and has contributed book chapters on Black women's history in fraternal orders and the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident. She is also a co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective blog, which has been recognized as a top feminist and race blog.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing
• Mathematics education
• Medicine
• Developmental psychology
• Communication

Selected publications

• The prevalence of relational basic concepts on core vocabulary lists for AAC: is frequency enough?

  Augmentative and Alternative Communication · 2024-04-15 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The selection of appropriate vocabulary is a crucial and challenging aspect of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention. Core vocabulary lists are frequently used to support vocabulary selection for children who require AAC. A vocabulary domain that has garnered limited attention within the AAC literature is relational basic concepts (RBCs). RBCs describe relationships between objects, persons, or situations, and play a pivotal role in language development, communication, and academic success. For the present study, we created a list of 156 RBCs, drawing primarily from assessments that measure basic concept knowledge in preschool and early elementary school students. We examined the overlap of these words on nine core vocabulary lists. We found that most concepts were not represented on any core lists. Additionally, there was relatively little overlap of RBCs between the core lists. These findings suggest that vocabulary selection resources created using exclusively a core vocabulary approach may have limited utility for identifying many concepts that preschool and early elementary students are expected to know and use. Implications for AAC research and practice are discussed with emphasis on the need for further consideration of RBCs within vocabulary selection practice and the field of AAC at large.

  PublisherDOI

• 14. The Pleasure Principle: Articulating a Post–Hip Hop Feminist Politics of Pleasure

  2022-10-28

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• The Pleasure Principle:

  2022-12-16

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Investigating the Intersectional Gap for Bilingual Children in Special Education

  Proceedings of the 2022 AERA Annual Meeting · 2022-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Investigating the Intersectional Gap for Bilingual Children in Special Education

  2022-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• An early Spanish vocabulary for children who use AAC: developmental and linguistic considerations

  Augmentative and Alternative Communication · 2021 · 21 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Artificial Intelligence

  For children with complex communication needs in the early stages of language development, access to appropriate vocabulary provides a means for social interaction and participation, and the foundation for the acquisition of grammar and other language related skills. While numerous resources are available to support decision making for speakers of English, there is a pressing need to rapidly expand such resources for other languages. Spanish is the official language in 20 countries, and in other countries (e.g., United States) Spanish-speaking communities represent a substantial proportion of the population. The aim of this study was to produce a developmentally-relevant word list for use by Spanish-speaking children in the early stages of language development. The list was developed from an analysis of overlap between published and validated lists of words produced by young Spanish speaking children with typical development. The list includes a wide range of word classes and semantic categories and is proposed as a tool to assist professionals, families and software developers in the process of selecting an initial lexicon for children who require AAC and are learning Spanish. Implications of our findings for vocabulary selection and future research directions are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Prompting for repair as a language teaching strategy for augmentative and alternative communication

  Augmentative and Alternative Communication · 2021 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology

  Conversational repair has been found to play a fundamental role in the acquisition of language. This paper describes existing research on conversational repair and its relationship to language learning, whether a first language or a second language, as well as its relevance to augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). A case is made for incorporating prompts to repair in conversation-based language interventions with children learning to use AAC. We argue that interventions targeting linguistic complexity should encourage self-repair in conversation in order to develop linguistic and operational competency as well as increase automaticity when using AAC. Clinical implications and directions for future research are discussed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Digital Demands Toward Decolonial Feminist Futures

  2020-11-06

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Epilogue

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2018-01-18

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Despite the fact that Black feminism, as a critical locus of Black women’s twentieth century knowledge production, has become a fully institutionalized field of academic specialization since the late 1970s, the contention of this book has been that there is still a requisite and tacit failure to take Black women’s work, as thinkers and theorists on broader questions affecting Black people, seriously. Yes, Black feminist women’s arguments about the centrality of gender to racial concerns have gained major academic currency, as evidenced by the broad use of intersectional discourse in numerous fields and disciplines. And yes, the new Black Lives Matter Movement, particularly as conceived by Garza, Tometi, and Cullors has made Black feminist politics the currency of Black radical thought. But the fact that Alicia Garza’s comments written in the second decade of the twenty-first century, sound eerily similar to commentary from Anna Julia Cooper writing in the nineteenth century, and Pauli Murray, Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks writing in the twentieth suggests that not enough has changed.

  PublisherDOI

• “Proper, Dignified Agitation”

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2018-01-18

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter recuperates Mary Church Terrell as a critical theorist of Black racial uplift. The first President of the NACW, Terrell went on to have a sixty-year career in Civil Rights activism. This chapter moves across the span of her career, mapping her development of a concept called “dignified agitation,” which she introduces in a 1913 speech. She returns to this formulation throughout her career, and the author argues that this idea of dignified agitation is one that she both learned and propagated as part of the NACW school of thought. But it also acts as a bridge concept, and she, as a bridge figure to Civil Rights era Black women intellectuals, who both respected the NACW school of thought and sought to move beyond it in critical ways. Because of the deliberate ways that Terrell wrote about her love of dancing in her autobiography, this chapter also considers the ways in which she is part of a genealogy of Black women’s pleasure politics, even though the current Black feminist discourse on pleasure typically focuses on blues women in this time period. Because Terrell is considered one of the foremost proselytizers of respectability, a turn toward her articulation of pleasure politics richly complicates the manner in which we read her as a theorist of racial resistance and gender progressivism.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gloria Soto

  San Francisco State University

  5 shared

• Susana M. Morris

  4 shared

• Treva B. Lindsey

  3 shared

• Aisha Durham

  University of South Florida

  3 shared

• Esther Armah

  2 shared

• Michael Clarke

  San Francisco State University

  2 shared

• Joan Morgan

  New York University Press

  2 shared

• Kaila Adia Story

  2 shared

Labs

• Black Ecologies LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., American Studies

  Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University

  2009

• M.A.

  Emory University

  2007

• B.A., English and Political Science

  Howard University

  2002