GC PhD student and Climate Action Lab participant Bibi Calderaro offers reflections and annotated resources on the possibilities of community-owned solar power to forge an intersection between renewable energy and social justice in urban neighborhoods.
Ecocriticism working group co-leader and GC PhD student Catherine Engh describes the group's process in making a website that hosts annotated reading lists for teaching writing on climate change.
In this post, scholar Kaitlin Mondello shares thoughts and examples from her own teaching about how food pedagogies can be used to involve students in examining the entanglements between environmental and social justice.
BMCC student Ugeita Tewari shares her experience of working on the event "Indo-Caribbean Stories" and of sharing her own story, while connecting with fellow Indo-Caribbeans living in Richmond Hill, Queens.
Researcher Christopher Clarke gives a precise account of his scholarly detective work into multiple archives of Muriel Rukeyser's writing, as he looks for the key to missing pages of her translations of Arthur Rimbaud, shedding new light on the history of American translations of his work.
Prof. Alexandra Juhasz reflects on the ongoing activities of the VHS Archives working group and how best to "care.share for digital and other fragile objects of and for the community who made or needs them." As the group creates a website and digital tool for working with this material among a group, they suggest that this work should be a party. In this post, Juhasz offers some ideas for "party games" for engaging community archives.
In this post, GC PhD student Harry Blain discusses his experience working with a team of eight researchers to help collect material for Dis-Ease, an essay film by Mariam Ghani, focused on how metaphors of illness have changed over time and how the discourses around disease shape their treatment. This project appeared in the exhibition, Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis at the Museum of the City of New York as part of the Wellcome Trust's Contagious Cities project.
In this interview, Climate Action Lab Fellow Madeleine Barnes interviews novelist Cai Emmons about her book Weather Woman, about a graduate-student-turned-meteorologist who learns she can control the weather, and the questions of power, responsibility, and collective action that this story raises around climate change.
Corinna Mullin discusses her Adjunct Incubator research project Securitizing Resistance in Gafsa: Stratified Vulnerability and Surplus Labor Accumulation. In this post, she details her research, searching for archival traces of the ways in which Tunisia's 2008 Gafsa mining basin uprising was depicted in the media, how it prefigured the more well-known 2010-2011 Tunisian revolt, and what this event reveals about the role of violence in law-making and the security state's repression of popular resistance.
GC PhD students and CUNY writing instructors Daisy Atterbury and Maxine Krenzel discuss their collaborative teaching initiative, inspired by poet Adrienne Rich's teaching materials “What We Are Part Of: Teaching at CUNY, 1968-1974.” They asked students to design their "dream courses" for students in one another's classes at Brooklyn College and Queens College. In this dialogue, they talk about the subtleties and the stakes of collaboration, what did or did not work in the process of student-to-student exchange, and what it means for teaching materials to have an archival life separate from that of student work.
Author Sara Nović shares thoughts on the day-long workshop and evening of performances and discussion, Publishing American Sign Language Poetry. In this short piece, she discusses various ideas raised about how ASL poetry might be published, critical questions that emerged from the day's conversation about ASL's relationship to written and spoken languages, and the particular expressivity of ASL.
In this post, writer Jamara Wakefield asks: How do we get people to talk about the oppressive nature of debt when there is so much stigma and shame attached to owing? Providing a survey of the workings of debt and its consequences, Wakefield advocates and models a form of resistance that is rooted in intersectional organizing and open dialogue. This piece was co-commissioned and co-published by the performance venue JACK, located in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, as an extension of their series Reparations365, in collaboration with Digital Humanities Fellow Jaime Shearn Coan.
In this lyrical essay, Aisha "Li" Cousins reworks the song that Billie Holiday made famous, "Good Morning Heartache," into a mantra for the day-to-day experience of encountering whiteness in the realm of non-profit arts organizations. This piece was commissioned and co-published by the performance venue JACK, located in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, as an extension of their series Reparations365, in collaboration with Digital Humanities Fellow Jaime Shearn Coan.
M.F.A. student in Digital & Interdisciplinary Art Practice Christine Stoddard discusses her planning fellowship with the 2018 Reclaimed Lands Conference, and reflects on how science and art can work together to change perceptions about land use, dispel myths about ecology, and create new possibilities for restoration.
Independent study student and recent CUNY BA program graduate Lauren Capellan details her experience working with the Laundromat Project's Kelly Street Initiative, while reflecting on the vital work supported by NEA funding; the work of artist Walter Cruz, who was Kelly Street's first artist-in-residence; and the food justice work of the Kelly Street Garden.
Scholar and VHS Archives working group founder Alexandra Juhasz recaps the manifold activities of the VHS Archives working group over the last year including the development of a digital platform prototype for ethical research of small collections of video, the concerns and ideas raised in meetings and writing by the working group members around everything from when to keep a public video private to how to work with archives that don't exist, except in memory. She also provides a preview of the group's activities for the 2018-2019 school year.
In this post, Teaching Fellow Daisy Atterbury unpacks how notions of "right thinking" and practices of correction are deployed in teaching writing and literature. By thinking through the work of David Antin, Reggie Watts, Renee Gladman, Donte Collins, Nicole B. Wallack, Amy Wan, Toni Jensen, and Camonghne Felix, she proposes poetry as a means of teaching writing otherwise, while considering how the concept of literacy creates and denies access, produces and withholds citizenship, and authorizes or negates. And how teaching writing means rethinking (and feeling for) "presence."
Lost & Found Managing Editor Stephon Lawrence and Academy of Young Writers high school student Gyjah Powers reflect on poet Adjua Greaves' Writers Lab Workshop on topics including delivery and performance of written poetry, the constructed nature of time, and the classification of the human.
Poet Najee Omar and Academy for Young Writers high school student Sabine Francis share reflections on Omar's Writers Lab Workshops including questions of legacy and Sankofa, telling one's own story, and performing poetry.
Digital Publics Fellow Jaime Shearn Coan shares thoughts from two meetings of the VHS Archives working group, framing questions of access to archival material, its often simultaneously private and public meanings, and how it is situated within the lives and communities it springs from. He also discusses the lack of available material he encountered in his research project on Assotto Saint, the need for equity in terms of whose lives and stories are preserved through archives, the notion of "degralescence" and the dilemma posed by the wealth of material captured on VHS in need of preservation, as well as how archives can be reanimated in contemporary contexts.
GC PhD student Shemon Salam reflects on the "Insurgent Solidarities: histories, formations, futures" conference, focusing on the "Economies and Solidarities" panel, which included presentations on Honduran women farm worker organizing, community kitchen programs in the wake of Hurricane Maria, and food cooperatives in Brooklyn as a means of countering gentrification.
Graduate Center PhD student Tie Jojima provides an overview of the "Art and Literature in Contemporary Dominican Republic, Haiti, and their Diasporas" conference on questions including how to represent Dominican and Haitian identities in their commonalities and differences, how everyday objects might provide an alternative lens for perceiving national identities and lived realities, how borders are constructed, and how to curate work across the shared and divergent experiences of Haiti's and DR's diasporas.
GC PhD student and Mellon Seminar Teaching Fellow Karen Okigbo shares the inspiration for and her approach to her project "Professional Development Pipeline," which seeks to offer undergraduate students role models for how to translate classroom learning into long-term career trajectories.
As part of a research project supported by the CUNY Adjunct Incubator, Graduate Center PhD candidate Angelika Winner outlines the thinking and methods behind her ethnographic study of food provisioning practices in Newark, NJ. Taking a critical approach to the dominant narrative that links the notion of food deserts with obesity rates, Winner seeks to develop an intersectional and dynamic understanding of food environments, eating habits, access, and their entanglements with food inequities.