2019 CUNY Adjunct Incubator Projects

In 2018-19, the CUNY Adjunct Incubator awarded grants to 13 CUNY adjuncts from 6 CUNY colleges to develop a wide-range of deeply impactful public and applied projects in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.

These projects range from addressing the needs and amplifying the successes of CUNY student-parents, to writing and performing new musical compositions for 3D-printed instruments, to photo-documentation of the erasure of Kurdish language from Kurdistan/Turkey, to food provision mapping that elucidates eating habits, access, and food inequities, and many more projects taking the form of concerts, dance, music, workshops, books, film, performance, classes, independent scholarship, and events.

“Although these fellowships cannot change the structural conditions in which adjunct labor is devalued, recipients of the CUNY Adjunct Incubator fellowships have expressed to me how important it has been to be recognized, and to have the support they need to pursue their research under such conditions.”

Mary Taylor, Assistant Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center, CUNY

Participants


Enhancing CUNY-Wide Capacity to Promote the Success of Student-Parents

Emily Hotez 
(Psychology, Hunter College, CUNY)

This project seeks to develop institutional and pedagogical policies and practices aimed at better serving the needs of student-parents at CUNY. 

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Screengrab from CUNY Parents website CUNYparents.com.

Creating a Literary Commons: Engaging Students in Digital Archives

Aaron Botwick and Gabrielle Kappes 
(English, Lehman College, CUNY)

This project is designed to enable students to better grasp the relationships between literature, culture, and history by drawing connections between the digital archives of 8th- through 20th-century literature and aspects of the current digital communications revolution.

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Advertisement: “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf from The Dial Magazine. Courtesy of the digital collection of the NYPL’s Henry W. And Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.

Innovating Technology In Art: Developing Contemporary Music for 3D-Printed Instruments

Harry Stafylakis 
(Music, City College of New York, CUNY)

This public research project is to create a new musical composition, Singularity, 2018, for 3D-printed string octet and orchestra.

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3D printed instrument in progress (Prototype 1) for Ottawa Symphony’s 3D StringTheory project. Photo courtesy of the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra.

Ethnography of Food Provisioning in Newark, NJ: Food Practices, Health Status, Social Identities, and Place of Residency

Angelika Winner 
(Earth Science and Geography, Lehman College/Hunter College, CUNY)

This project is an ethnographic study of food provisioning practices in Newark, NJ, seeking to develop an intersectional and dynamic understanding of food environments, eating habits, access, and their entanglements with food inequities.

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This map shows the four neighborhoods in Newark, Fairmount, Upper Roseville, Central Business District, and Ironbound, which were the focus of Angelika Winner’s ethnographic research on food provisioning. 

The Right to the Image: Syrian Film Collective Abounaddara’s Emergency Cinema

Jason Fox 
(Film & Media, Hunter College, CUNY)

This project is a collection of essays that offers a critical introduction to the groundbreaking videos and activism of Abounaddara, the anonymous Syrian film collective, framing the ethical, political, and aesthetic insights of their work within the transformative effects of new digital technologies in war reporting and social justice campaigns.

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Still screenshot from Abounaddara’s The Battle of Aleppo, 2016. Courtesy of the filmmakers.

g1 (host): lostatsea

Nia Love 
(Drama, Theatre & Dance, Queens College, CUNY)

This project is an unfolding of the term “ghost,” which grapples with what it means to live within conditions shaped by the “afterlife” of slavery. This project will take the form of a four-part performance installation which is driven by this fundamental query: what remains of the Middle Passage as force, gesture, and affect?

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Nia Love dance photos. Screenshot from Nia Love’s website nia-love.com.

Securitizing Resistance in Gafsa: Stratified Vulnerability and Surplus Labor Accumulation

Corinna Mullin 
(Political Science, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY)

This project builds upon the multi-method qualitative research she has conducted in Tunisia over the past six years on the colonial origins, architecture, and imperial imbrications of Tunisia’s security state.

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Tunisian National Archives: By Touzrimounir – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 at Wikimedia.

Successful Lessons: Best Practices by Adjuncts in Literature & Composition/Rhetoric

Maria Grewe and Mark Alpert 
(English, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY)

This project is a three-part pedagogy workshop series led by composition/rhetoric and literature adjunct faculty in the English Department at John Jay College, CUNY to provide a forum for and foster collaboration between adjunct faculty.

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Photo courtesy of Mark Alpert.


The Musical Seeds Project: Intersections of Ecology, Music, and Dance

Pamela A. Proscia 
(Education, Hunter College, CUNY)

This project is a series of educational events that seek to expand the ways in which we think about growing and harvesting plant life through the perspectives of cross-cultural communities.

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Image from Musical Seeds Project Facebook page.

Bridging Mathematics and Computer Science

James Myer 
(Mathematics, Queens College, CUNY)

This project is a series of events and workshops bringing together faculty from the Mathematics and Computer Science departments at Queens College, CUNY to discuss interdisciplinary approaches to computer science and mathematics by putting them in conversation around mutual relevance.

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A partial map of the Internet, rendered based on ping delay and colored based on TLD. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Credit: The Opte Project via Creative Commons License 2.5.


Support

The CUNY Adjunct Incubator is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at The Graduate Center, CUNY. The Center for the Humanities thanks the Sylvia Klatzkin Steinig Fund for their generous support.