In this interview, Mellon Seminar Faculty Lead Chloë Bass discusses her project "Here and Not There" with Queenie Sukhadia, as well as the responsibilities of the public university, how to make research accessible to non-academic audiences, and how the resources of the university can be used "towards a larger good rather than controlled through scarcity mentalities and ongoing austerity."
In this blog post, Sonia Adams outlines strategies for both pedagogical and curricular development approaches that integrate the importance of global literature in English classrooms across CUNY and beyond.
In this essay, Iris Cushing recounts her evolving relationships with the constellation of poets, relationships and writing surrounding and published in Lost & Found, including Diane di Prima, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Mary Norbert Korte, Judy Grahn, and David Henderson, following the "glowing breadcumbs" that illuminated her path between them.
In this essay, Mellon Seminar Faculty Lead Ángeles Donoso Macaya writes about the workshop series Brewing Memories, led by Carolina Saavedra. In her reflections on these workshops, Donoso Macaya considers how the transmission of memory and indigenous knowledges through plants, herbs, and food might also create an archive in common––one that "is not based on, and which does not reproduce, extractive methodologies, but rather that emerges, and keeps developing further, from the same collaborative process of creating and learning together."
In this short essay, Distributaries Writer-in-Residence Queenie Sukhadia reflects on her Instagram-based public humanities project, Academia for All, a platform where she breaks down key theoretical and academic texts for audiences with limited attention spans and/or who might be disinclined to read academic writing. Here, she gives insight into her motivations to make this project, considers how the project has functioned and who it has reached thus far, and poses questions of what future directions the project might lead.
In this essay, André Luis Leite de Figueirêdo Sales reflects on how models of prefigurative activism from Brazilian high school student ativistas making their own schools to ACT UP's imperative to "act as if you had the power to produce reality" might inspire educators to reimagine their roles as activists in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Distributaries Writer-in-Residence Queenie Sukhadia offers a series of short reflections on a selection of texts that exemplify the potentials of the public humanities. As she writes, "The public humanities are less a noun and more a verb: questioning, reflecting, deconstructing, reconstructing, retreating, ceding, and most of all, becoming (a necessarily incomplete process)."
In this blog post, Mellon Seminar Digital Publics Fellow Nga Than discusses the effects of switching to virtual instruction mid-semester during the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020, particularly considering its impacts on the formation of community among students and the exchange of emotions between students and teachers.
In this interview, Dr. Terri N. Watson and Dr. Gina Charles discuss the vital role that Black women teachers play for Black girls, including the formative influence of their early relationship as junior high school teacher and student as well as a wider conversation about how Black women teachers provide "mirrors and windows," through which Black girls can see themselves in leadership roles and flourish in their educations, career paths, and lives.
In the final short essay in the series "Practicing Distance," artist Jeff Kasper offers resources for developing support networks during the pandemic and beyond. Pointing toward the Bay Area Transformative Justice Coalition (BATJC)'s model of pod mapping, Kasper reflects on how knowing who is in our pods––a term the BATJC developed to define who we might turn to for care, in the wake of harm––might be a useful starting point, as we navigate limited access to public space, particularly those who depend on it for their safety.
In this reflection by artist Jeff Kasper on the proxemics of social distance, he offers an exercise for transforming conflict through collaboration and cooperation rather than compromise. This exercise proposes collectively devising social stories to "articulat[e] one's personal boundaries and approach the context of physical distance and giving and receiving care" amid the ongoing reality of conflict in social situations.
In his latest entry in his series "Practicing Distance," artist Jeff Kasper continues his consideration of proxemics in our time of physical distance. In this short essay, Kasper proposes instructional scores and prompts, which might be used to "choreograph care" to navigate the intimacies and risks of sharing personal space. He also considers how we might prioritize dependency in our understandings of intimate relationships.
Writer in Residence Queenie Sukhadia makes a case for how the public humanities might allow those working in the academy to rethink the false binary between public and academic knowledge. In this piece, she insists on the responsibility of scholarship to promote social good, by sharing out knowledge and expertise beyond the academy and elaborating the ways in which public knowledge shapes academic work.
Diarenis Calderón Tartabull turns to the work of Audre Lorde to think through questions of how to preserve and nourish communities and our selves––physically, spiritually and emotionally––in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. This English/Spanish work is part of the 'Audre Lorde Now' series, commissioned for the project Radiating Black~Puerto Rican~Women’s Teaching Archives from CUNY to the Americas and the Caribbean (and Back Again).
Tito Mitjans Alayón's letter to Audre Lorde connects the intimately personal impacts of Lorde's reflections on "the political value of survival, eroticism and spirituality" to conditions of contemporary life. This English/Spanish work is part of the 'Audre Lorde Now' series, commissioned for the project Radiating Black~Puerto Rican~Women’s Teaching Archives from CUNY to the Americas and the Caribbean (and Back Again).
AnouchK Ibacka Valiente reflects on the transformative effects of Audre Lorde's work on Afro-diasporic / queer communities in Germany. This English/Spanish work is part of the 'Audre Lorde Now' series, commissioned for the project Radiating Black~Puerto Rican~Women’s Teaching Archives from CUNY to the Americas and the Caribbean (and Back Again).
Conor Tomás Reed reflects on how the legacy of Audre Lorde's life and writing might be a means and medicine for living through the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. This English/Spanish work is part of the 'Audre Lorde Now' series, commissioned for the project Radiating Black~Puerto Rican~Women’s Teaching Archives from CUNY to the Americas and the Caribbean (and Back Again).
In this second entry in artist Jeff Kasper's multi-part guide for preparing for our futures together post-quarantine, he facilitates a series of guided on exercises to engage with solo or with a partner to practice imagined intimate distance. From imagining physical contact to thinking about your partner's vulnerabilities, these exercises focus on how to "expand our capacities for collective care."
This is the first in artist Jeff Kasper's multi-part guide for preparing for our futures together post-quarantine, Practicing Distance. In each part, Kasper offers a series of short practices in blog-format, beginning with an introduction on four proxemic distances—intimate, personal, social, public—then facilitating guided creative exercises to engage with solo or with a partner in imagined physical proximity during the time of the pandemic and beyond. In this first post, Kasper lays out a context for thinking about these questions in relation to COVID-19, disability justice, and Edward Hall's notion of proxemics.
In this post, 2020 Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival organizer Leah Batstone writes about how changes in contemporary Ukrainian politics and culture are reflected in the music of Ukraine, in the wake of the 2013 Revolution of Dignity.
Spencer Garcia writes about the formation of community and their own process of self-reflection in sharing and discussing Audre Lorde's work among Black women and queer, trans, and non-binary Black people and people of color in the reading group,"Your Silence Will Not Protect You!"
VHS Archives working group founder Alexandra Juhasz looks back on the second year of activities of the VHS Archives working group and discusses their steps toward creating a communal means for preserving and activating analog archives on digital platforms and the ethical use of the traces we leave behind.
In this post, VHS Archives working group member and artist Tara Mateik shares his thoughts about the importance of tangible media as a form of leaving evidence of queer lives and revisits the collaborative video Homecoming Queens with some of his collaborators and the working group.
VHS Archives working group member Kyle Croft unpacks questions about historicizing and activating analog archives. Centered around work from the Visual AIDS' Artist+ Registry and the artist Lucretia Critchlow, Croft opens up a discussion around avoiding over-determinations of an artist's career and their relationship to other artists, reckoning with privacy concerns in terms of how media distribution has dramatically changed over time, and complicating the notion of primary sources.