Groovin’ Griot is a podcast exploring how we use dance to tell stories throughout the African Diaspora. It is produced and edited by my co-host, OreOluwa Badaki, and I, with the support of the Teachers College Digital Futures Institute. The term “griot” comes from the West African tradition of oral and embodied storytelling. Griots are traveling poets, musicians, genealogists, and historians who preserve and tell stories via a variety of modalities. On Groovin’ Griot, we are centering the West African Diaspora, honoring the legacy of the griot by talking to the storytellers in our communities who help us understand the role of dance in remembering and reimagining the lessons embedded in these stories.
In lieu of a dissertation proposal defense slideshow, I created a zine outlining my commitments to the project, theoretical framework, chapter overview, and multimodal components. In addition to providing a snapshot of my broader dissertation work, it also speaks to my commitments to rigorous, multimodal scholarship.
#WeAreTogether: University Branding in the time of COVID and Black Lives Matter
“That is, in ‘uncertain times,’ universities must contend with crises—whether these be internal to a specific school or a national or global crisis—and university administrators are charged with management of the brand and the university’s reputation. What this kind of management entails varies. In the following pages, we analyze some of the ways Western universities attempt to maintain their brand and reputation during times of global crises. Specifically, the 2020 arrival of both the global COVID-19 pandemic and the global reckoning on racial justice posed significant challenges to universities across the world. Both the pandemic and the global visibility of #BlackLivesMatter forced into bold relief the deficit of care networks in all institutions, including the university. Not only did universities have to immediately “pivot” (a word that practically became part of the brand in itself) to online platforms because of national and global lockdowns, but universities also had to generate a response to the heightened visibility of #BlackLivesMatter movements as well as to their own institutionalized racism and racist histories. Of course, the adjustments universities made during this time were not only technological but emotional, psychological, and social—these were global crises that among other things generated massive anxiety and rage. That is, they had to maintain their brands affectively.”
As Black and brown scholars, we are taught to leave our knowledge-making practices at the door. The suppression of our cultural knowledges and personal and collective histories within traditional academic research maintains Western, Eurocentric epistemological norms within the academy, thereby perpetuating dominant white masculinist perspectives as “neutral,” and the only standpoints from which legitimate knowledge can be produced (Collins, 2000). Scholars such as Eve Tuck, S.R. Toliver, Angela Figueiredo, and K. Wayne Wang, among many others, have put forth decolonial methods by which we can begin to value alternative ways of knowing. This project, in accordance with these methodologies, is an effort to reinscribe the people, culture, and history that most directly make up who I am and the work that I do.
The CAMRA Archives podcast is a project of the Collective for the Advancement of Multimodal Research Arts (or CAMRA) at the University of Pennsylvania. We foster interdisciplinary collaborations amongst scholars, artists and educators within and beyond UPenn to explore, practice, evaluate and teach about multimedia research and representation.
The CAMRA Archives podcast aims to chronicle a range of exciting multimodal projects happening in and around CAMRA. The first season of the CAMRA Archives podcast is titled “Black Women in Motion.” It explores movement and embodiment as methodology and pedagogy in Black women’s institutional/organizational leadership, research, and personal practices. This focus stems partly from my being a Black dancer trying to make sense of how my own movement practices can play a role in my scholarship, but also from the abundance of Black women movers and research artists within and orbiting around CAMRA.
The episode featured here is episode 2, where I interview Christina Knight, Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College and the co-founder of knightworks dance theater. We discuss embodiment and spirituality, the decolonial potential of diasporic movement practices, and Black imagination in the context of the speculative works she develops with her sister, Jessi Knight.
“The 2020 protests for Black lives caught the eye of several of Philadelphia’s public arts programs, who commissioned Black artists to paint public murals that could bear witness to what had transpired. I became interested in researching and analyzing murals related to the Black Lives Matter movement because I was curious about how Black publics were choosing to represent these events, and how they might differ from more mainstream (white) narratives. As a recent transplant to the city, I saw this venture as an opportunity to get to know Philadelphia in a deeper and more nuanced way, but more than anything I wanted to understand how this visual mode of communication allows Black artists to tell their stories differently from the ones circulating in the media.”
These collages are a visual reflection on some of the dances/movements studied throughout the Kinesthetic Anthropology course taught by Professor Deb Thomas. Inspired by Katherine Dunham’s work, where she traveled and studied dance and culture throughout Haiti and the Caribbean seeking to understand a sort of essentialized Blackness (or negritude) originated in Africa and retained by people of the African diaspora as we moved and were moved around the world. Zora Neale Hurston's Characteristics of Negro Expression also resonate with this work, and played a large role in the formation of this project. In a similar (yet much less thorough) fashion, this series of collages seeks to visually understand patterns in movements/dances and the cultures which surround them across the African diaspora.
(Re)Search for Solutions is a podcast created by the Media and Social Change Lab (MASCLab) at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Season 1 of the podcast is a limited series focusing specifically on unexpected and creative ways that researchers are looking at solutions to the persistence of gun violence. To develop these stories, we collaborate with the experts (professors, community members, doctors, activists, teachers, and more) to understand the stories surrounding their work.
Episode 6 of (Re)Search for Solutions is titled “Gun Violence and the Criminal (In)Justice System. It takes a hard look at how in some cases, communities, especially communities of color, are harmed by efforts claiming to be in service of stopping gun violence. We look at one of the most well-known examples of discriminatory policing, “Stop and Frisk,” and how these types of ineffective practices become legitimized.
This episode was lead produced and edited by me. I also built the (Re)Search for Solutions website.
Street art has always been intriguing to me, as I consider it one of the most authentic, public art forms to exist. It pushes us to question how we define “art,” as it frequently subverts the norms of “traditional,” more elitist forms. Its relationship with the law and the policies regulating who can create art and where have caused street art to become especially contentious, making it all the more interesting to photograph. The systematic attempts to regulate and/or eradicate street art in certain areas created an especially interesting line of inquiry for me to pursue as I completed my project.
Truss, A., Riina-Ferrie, J., Rajan, S., Vasudevan, L. (2020)
“Considering a wide variety of perspectives is crucial to understanding social issues and their solutions. By intentionally centering the voices of a diverse range of experts, our team at (Re)Search for Solutions aims to disrupt singular and oftentimes narrow discourses of complex phenomena. The first season of our podcast focuses on approaches to preventing the persistent issue of gun violence in America.”
In creating Multimodal Monthly: The YPAR Edition, my goal was to produce an artifact that is both a resource for and an example of multimodal methods. As a result, this magazine embodies multimodal practice. Wissman, Staples, Vasudevan, & Nichols (2015) discuss embodied inquiry as referring to “how the realignment of roles and responsibilities, and redistribution of materiality within a space, substantively changes the nature of the inquiry that can occur within research spaces” (p. 189).
In allowing for the use of multiple artistic forms, a magazine capitalizes on the meaning that can be made from photographs and graphic design, in addition to what can be communicated via the written language. This project also includes links to outside videos, podcasts, music, and web pages, even further expanding the ways in which I am able to communicate my ideas.
“Even further, I’ve noticed some discussion of who it benefits to ignore the effects of climate change. Calling out “about 100 companies and the billionaire class they create” as the primary cause/beneficiaries of the corporate practices causing climate change, and pointing out the fact that the oil, gas, and coal industries spend roughly $430,000 per day on lobbying, the analysis of the relationship between power and the perpetuation of this false narrative is one of the most fundamental critical practices someone can engage in. By following the money, these TikTokers make clear the role financial gains play in the destruction of the Earth.”
“… the imagination of liberation in the future anterior sense of the noun. It’s in a similarly grammatical sense, a grammar of futurity realized in the present, that I want to pose my opening question once again: What would it mean for a Black feminist to think in the grammar of futurity?” (Tina Campt, 2017)
An exercise in world-making, this collage was created as a final project for the Fall 2020 Black Speculative Futures course taught by Professor Christina Knight. Inspired by the work of Octavia Butler, adrienne maree brown, Walidah Imarisha, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, N.K. Jemisin, Tina Campt, Janelle Monae, Eric King Watts, Cassandra L. Jones and Martine Syms, it speculates an inevitable end of the world as we know it brought about by climate change and capitalism, then reflects on the types of healing that would be required for us to collectively create a better world after this end.
Reflecting on the work of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013), this piece is also an act of academic fugitivity. In expressing my ideas and synthesizing my understandings of via collage, I aim to subvert the norms knowledge production in the academy and resist the “professionalization of the critical academic” (p. 28). “Any attempt at passion, at stepping out of [a] skepticism of the known into an inadequate confrontation with what exceeds it and oneself, must be suppressed by this professionalization” (p. 35-36); in creating this piece, I hoped to explore the outskirts of my imagination in order to confront the unknown.
(Re)Search for Solutions is a podcast created by the Media and Social Change Lab (MASCLab) at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Season 1 of the podcast is a limited series focusing specifically on unexpected and creative ways that researchers are looking at solutions to the persistence of gun violence. To develop these stories, we collaborate with the experts (professors, community members, doctors, activists, teachers, and more) to understand the stories surrounding their work.
Episode 4 of (Re)Search for Solutions is titled “This Is Our Lane.” It reflects on the crucial role emergency medicine physicians, who are on the front lines of responding to firearm injuries, play in developing solutions.
This episode was lead produced and edited by me. I also built the (Re)Search for Solutions website.
“We designed, implemented and evaluated a game about fake news to test its potential to enhance news literacy skills in educational settings. The game was largely effective at facilitating complex news literacy skills. When these skills were integrated into the design and fictional narrative of the game, diverse groups of students engaged with the learning goals and transferred this knowledge to real life contexts. The fictional narrative allowed students to learn about misinformation without the distraction of political stances and divisions, and deploying news literacy strategies as a winning strategy within the game allowed students to articulate and practice these skills. However, teacher preparation for game-based learning mattered, and additional support is needed for integrating such games into school curricula.”
For my Cinema as Cross-Cultural Communication class, we were asked to multimodally explore the notion of “culture-crossing.” As a result, I chose to use a cookbook, as food is one of the most salient expressions of cultural identity. Recipes are passed down through generations, and frequently survive despite marginalization and/or colonization. As a result, even the simplest recipe provides insight into the history, beliefs, lifestyle and norms of a given culture. The resulting artifact includes personal reflections; links to videos, music, and podcasts; and analyses of the readings and movies we engaged with throughout the semester.
(Re)Search for Solutions is a podcast created by the Media and Social Change Lab (MASCLab) at Teachers College, Columbia University.
We use media to amplify research and to center the perspectives of a diverse range of experts – researchers, practitioners, and community members and leaders – in order to interrupt singular and oftentimes narrow discourses of complex social and natural phenomena.
Season 1 of the podcast is a limited series focusing specifically on unexpected and creative ways that researchers are looking at solutions to the persistence of gun violence. To develop these stories, we collaborate with the experts (professors, community members, doctors, activists, teachers, and more) to understand the stories surrounding their work.
Episode 1 of (Re)Search for Solutions discusses greening - the conversion of an overgrown vacant lot to a small, grass-covered community space - as a non-policy-based solution to gun violence.
This episode was lead produced and edited by me. I also built the (Re)Search for Solutions website.
This is an episode of the MASCLab (Media & Social Change Lab) Podcast that I produced and edited.
MASCLab’s Podfest is A Celebration of Podcasting and Media-Makeing held each year at Teachers College, Columbia University. The event is hosted in the state-of-the-art Smith Learning Theater to provide an interactive and immersive environment for students, researchers, practitioners and community members to come together and share in the experience of listening.
Our 2019 Podfest included a bit of live podcasting, where we hosted a panel to discuss all things multimodality. The panel included Lalitha Vasudevan, Ioana Literat, Haeny Yoon, Katie Newhouse, and Dalia Constantine.
