Angela Mensah, a teaching assistant professor of African and African American studies and communication at the University of Arkansas, has been awarded the National Communication Association Activism and Social Justice Division Pedagogy Award.
Dr. Mensah was honored for her development of the service-learning designated course, “Communicating Body Image.” Dr. Mensah’s course aims to identify hidden assumptions about body image as it relates to the intersections of race, class, gender, and body image in America. Students will expand their understanding of the issues through independent reading and synthesis. Students are expected to facilitate the production of systematic knowledge by applying theory to critically analyze a media-related phenomenon on content. This course is designed to stimulate student interest in feminist media studies as an academic discipline that can also provide insights to practitioners and researchers of body image and eating disorders.
“I hope to continue building the program by adding more community and campus partners to give the girls a chance to do more positive activities to enrich their lives and encourage them to stay in school and build a better future for themselves and their families,” Dr. Mensah said.
This course should be appropriately called “How to erase Eurocentrism, Euro thought, Euro ideals, Euro Paradigms, and especially Euro standards of beauty from native born Black American women along with those African and Caribbean Diaspora”. In other words, how to mentally cleanse the European from the mind of Black women domestically and abroad. Quite honestly, it would be easier for Elon Musk to launch a space ship to Pluto than to convince so-called Black American women to stop wearing unnecessary hair extension or hair weaves willingly.