Laboratories and Workshops

As Founding Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure (LxC) lifexcode.org, Johnson leads over one hundred labs, projects, members and community partners in exploring ways digital and social media, technology and knowledges can support radical (antiracist and deconial) movement-making, intellectual production and community formation.

Labs, projects and LxC members advance radical, Black feminist, digital humanities research through public facing projects that bring history, social justice, and digital media into conversation with each other. Current projects explore digital history and historical repositories related to marronage and fugitivity, Black Louisiana, Black churches in Baltimore, Black data and AI, Black Puerto Rican data and resistance, Black cultural workers, and more.

LxC is the winner of the 2020 Garfinkel Prize from the American Studies Association. </p>

In 2024, 100% of LifexCode current and former graduate student members on the job market secured tenure-track jobs and/or postdoctoral fellowships.

Johnson is a PI on Black Beyond Data, a Black Studies computational humanities lab initiative with Kim Gallon (Black Press Research Collective) and Alexandre White (Risk and Racism Project). She is co-PI on the Diaspora Solidarities Lab (dslprojects.org) a virtual Black feminist pedagogies and practice lab. She is co-convener of the Black World Seminar with Drs. Nathan Connolly, Didier Gondola, Larry Jackson, Martha Jones, Minkah Makalani, Leah Wright Rigeur and Sasha Turner as well as convener of the Sex and Slavery Lab (2018-2019). She is affiliate faculty in the Department of the History of Medicine and a Board Member in the Program for Museums and Society.