Visioning Practice: Spaces of Hope and Labor

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Professional Development Format

Abstract

This panel aims to explore the visionary thinking and practical strategies necessary to imagine and execute urgent intellectual and political possibilities. By focusing on case studies of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab and LifexCode ecosystems, the panel highlights the processes and practices DH scholars, practitioners, and community partners can use to sustain connections between scholars and communities beyond empire, fostering critical interventions. This articulation echoes activist Jacqui Alexander in “Remembering This Bridge Called My Back, Remembering Ourselves.” She explains, “Vision can only be as effective and as sturdy as our determination to practice.” She emphasizes, “It is the daily practice that will bring about the necessary shifts in perception that make change possible. Vision helps us to remember why we do the work. Practice is the how; it makes the change and grounds the work” (279).


The Diaspora Solidarities Lab (DSL) is a multi-institutional Black feminist partnership that supports solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies conducted by undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members, and community partners who are committed to transformative justice and accountable to communities beyond the Western academy. We sponsor both traditional analog and digital experimental scholarship to build knowledge communities across institutions and geographies, training participants in the practices and principles of radical media, ethics of Black feminist praxis, and decolonial and antiracist principles. We emphasize the literacies of the born-digital and in-person ethical collaboration.


LifexCode is a collective of labs, projects, and researchers that provides its members (undergraduate and graduate students and faculty across the world) opportunities to learn digital skills, do research in digital archives, and create community-accountable digital projects attuned to histories of marginalized groups. We center antiracist and decolonial methodologies in this work, explicitly reaching beyond the walls of the university in order to engage with our Black and other diverse communities in Baltimore, New Orleans, Puerto Rico, Providence (R.I.), Pittsburgh, East Lansing/Lansing (Michigan), Chicago, Charleston (Avery Research Center), and Washington D.C. (Moorland-Springarn).


Both DSL and LifexCode ecosystems serves as examples of DH ecosystems emphasizing vision and practice.The roundtable begins with brief introductions and reflections. Jessica Marie Johnson and Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez will reflect on the development of their ecosystems. Sarah Bruno will center fabulation via her work with the Criadas Project, a sample database of

Puerto Rican women and girl domestics, and discuss how speculative interventions in this digital project works in tandem with accountability. Kiana Gonzalez-Cedeño will discuss the continued work of the After The Storm Collective, born out of the DSL. She will highlight how the collective theorizes the U.S. Black South, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico as the Greater Caribbean, offering how the digital humanities has allowed them to reimagine cartographies of the Caribbean to showcase what they theorize as Afro-diasporic bonds. Yafrainy Familia will reflect on the work of the Survival of a People, a DSL microlab entrusted as memory stewards of Frank Espada’s photography and oral history archive. She will discuss the lab’s efforts to amplify the presence of marginalized and Black Puerto Ricans in Espada’s archive.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Nadejda Jahi Webb, Johns Hopkins University

Panelists

• Jessica Marie Johnson, Johns Hopkins University

• Sarah Bruno, Michigan State University

• Yomaira C Figueroa-Vasquez, CUNY Hunter

• Yafrainy Familia, Washington University in St Louis

• Kiana Gonzalez-Cedeno, Texas Christian University

Biographical Information

Jessica Maria Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and a former fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of the multiple award-winning book Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020). Johnson is an internationally recognized digital humanist. Johnson is the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and Senior Research Associate with the Center for the Digital Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Johnson is PI of Black Beyond Data, a Black studies computational and social sciences lab, with co-PIs Kim Gallon and Alexandre White. Alongside Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa, Johnson also co-directs the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a Mellon-funded multi-university initiative applying Black feminist methodologies to collaborative scholarship. Johnson is co-editor with Lauren Tilton and David Mimno of Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities. She was guest editor of Slavery in the Machine, a special issue of archipelagos journal (2019) and co-editor with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) of Black Code: A Special Issue of the Black Scholar (2017). Her work has appeared in Slavery & Abolition, The Black Scholar, Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, American Quarterly, Social Text, The Journal of African American History, the William & Mary Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Forum Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Perspectives (AAIHS), Somatosphere and Post-Colonial Digital Humanities (DHPoco) and her book chapters have appeared in multiple edited collections.

Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez is the author of the award-winning monograph, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020) which examines the textual, historical, and political relations between diasporic Afro-Puerto Rican, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Dominican, and Equatoguinean literary poetics. In 2023 Decolonizing Diasporas was translated into Spanish and published by Editora Educación Emergente, a Puerto Rico-based press. Her current book project, The Survival of a People (under contract with Duke University Press), examines the disappearances and excesses of Afro-Puerto Rican island and diasporic peoples through the study of familial stories, archival histories, photography, visual art, and film from the late 19th century to the present. Her published work can be found in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, the Journal of Decolonization, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, SX Salon, Hispanofilia, Contemporânea, Post-45 Contemporaries, Ethnic Studies Rise, Black Latinas Know, and Feminist Formations.
A scholar and organizer, she was a founder of the MSU Womxn of Color Initiative, collaborative study-away project #ProyectoPalabrasPR, and the digital/material site Taller Electric Marronage, and led the MSU Mentoring Underrepresented Scholars in English Program (MUSE), and has has served in leadership roles for the Modern Languages Association (MLA), the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the American Studies Association (ASA), the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA), and the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA).
Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez was a 2015-2017 Duke University SITPA Scholar, a 2017-2018 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and a 2021-2022 Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellow, and a 2022-2024 Mellon Crossing Latinidades Faculty Fellow. She is the PI and co-director of the “Diaspora Solidarities Lab,” a $2M Mellon-funded Higher Learning project focused on Black feminist digital humanities initiatives that support solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies. In 2024 Yomaira was awarded a $6.4M grant from the Mellon Foundation to support her “Rooted & Relational” vision for CENTRO, an expansive 5-year plan to transform the research and community impact of CENTRO.


Sarah Bruno is the Diasporas Solidarity Lab Postdoctoral Fellow (2023) and incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University. 2022-2023 postdoctoral fellow in Latinx Art, Cultures, and Religions in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. Her research and art lie at the intersections of ethnography, performance, diaspora, and digitality. She is currently writing her first manuscript, Black Rican Dexterity where she uses the Afro-Puerto Rican genre of bomba as a site and method in constructing a cartography of Black Puerto Rican femme feeling throughout history. Dr. Bruno was a Mellon ACLS Dissertation Fellow in 2020-2021 and the 2020 awardee of the Association of Black Anthropologists Vera Green Prize for Public Anthropology. Bruno was the 2021-2022 ACLS Emerging Voices Race and Digital Technologies postdoctoral fellow at the Franklin Humanities Institute and in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is a member of the Black Latinas Know Collective and is one of the lab leads of Taller Entre Aguas, micro lab within the Diasporas Solidarity Lab, that focuses on Black Puerto Rican digital spaces, data, and lives beyond and against the archives. She charges herself to continue to write with care about the never-ending process of enduring, imagining, thriving, and healing in Puerto Rico and its diaspora.

Kiana González Cedeño (k.gonzalezcedeno@tcu.edu) (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University. As a transdisciplinary scholar, González-Cedeño’s work sits at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, Ethnic Studies, Third World Feminist Theory, and Popular Culture. Her current book project, Lamentos: Tracing Resistance and Rebellion in Puerto Rico utilizes lamentation as a theoretical framework to elevate histories of rebellion and disobedience in Puerto Rico. She looks at popular culture as a corpus that demonstrates the ways Black Puerto Ricans have refused and resisted colonial empire since the start of modernity. She also co-leads the After the Storm Collective, a multi-institutional, transnational digital humanities project that archives the testimonios and oral histories of Black and Afro-descendant women in the Greater Caribbean surviving environmental disasters. You can find her writing in Centro Journal.

Yafrainy Familia is a PhD Candidate and Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow in Caribbean Literatures, Arts and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Her research is situated at the nexus of Caribbean Cultural Studies, Black and Latinx Feminisms, and Critical Geography, and bridges traditional research methods with community-engaged and digital humanities practices. She is a Solidarity Fellow in the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, where she works in the Survival of a People microlab. Her dissertation project, “Sites of Freedom: Caribbean Art, Gender and the Politics of Space,” examines how contemporary Caribbean women and queer artists use their creative platforms to disrupt the cartographies of colonial modernity and imagine radical forms of geographic freedom. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism and Diasporic Collage: Puerto Rico and The Survival of a People.

Chair:

Nadejda Isha Webb is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Center for Digital Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the Assistant Director of LifexCode: DH Against Enclosure. Her research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st-century African-American and Post-Colonial literature and digital humanities, imaginaries, and representation. One of her current projects, “Beyond a Haunting,” queries the relationship between histories of indenture and belonging to understand how descendants of indenture are grappling with this positionality. Webb’s research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, Columbia University’s Center for Oral History, the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins, the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and Vanderbilt University. She holds a B.A. in English Language and Literature from CUNY Hunter College and a joint Ph.D. in English and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice from Vanderbilt.