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.
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."