Multimodal Scholarship
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.
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.
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.
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.
Listen to the full episode here!
(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.
“… 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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.