Azsaneé Truss is a thinking artist and PhD Candidate in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Here, she studies the role of multimodal forms in structuring liberatory knowledge production processes. Her work is a Black feminist approach to multimodal theory, grounded in the theoretical and political traditions of cultural studies, performance studies, critical media studies, and Black studies.
Truss’s dissertation work focuses on Black American conspiracy theorizing as an alternative mode of knowledge production. This project explicates the culturally specific roots and logics of these practices and understand them as a type of vernacular theory grounded in critical and embodied understandings of historical and modern-day racialized oppression. Through a critical multimodal discursive analysis of some of the Black art and media where these theories have been particularly prevalent, this project aims to understand how form structures these more subversive ways of thinking.
In addition to her dissertation work, Truss also studies popular culture, the limits of neoliberal representation, youth media, birth work as practices of futurity, Black radical imagination, and the speculative. She uses podcasting, photography, collage, film, and other media, in addition to traditional written forms in her work. In accordance with Black feminist approaches to research, her work fundamentally seeks to disrupt hegemonic ideas about what constitutes legitimate scholarship through these multimodal practices. She is currently working on a project exploring the notion of Sankofa through collage, and she recently produced a film exploring the parallels between ships and the Black maternal womb as vessels of captivity and liberation with collaborator Cienna Davis through Penn’s Center for Experimental Ethnography.
As a student at Annenberg, Truss is an active member of CAMRA (the Collective for the Advancement of Multimodal Research Arts) and the Center for Experimental Ethnography, is a fellow in CARGC (the Center for Advanced Global Research in Communication), sits on the Center for Media at Risk’s steering committee, and was a Summer 2022 Fellow in the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication.
Prior to joining Annenberg, Truss earned her M.A. in Instructional Technology & Media from Teachers College, Columbia University (TC). There, she studied the ways in which media production can be used to both teach youth critical media literacy skills and teach us about the world they hope to create. In coordination with her work as a fellow in the Media & Social Change Lab at TC, her thesis took shape as a magazine focused on using documentary film-making to facilitate youth participatory action research projects with the Educational Video Center. Truss was also a featured graduate as she completed her studies at TC. While her specific dissertation topic has shifted, the same questions about/theories of power, information, dominant histories/narratives, and alternative forms of knowledge production underly her current work.