Student Work: Research
Music as Advocacy in the United States
What features make music successful in catalyzing social change?
Gender Expression for Black Queer Women
How are Willow Smith and Janelle Monáe doing gender expression in their music videos?
The Single Woman: From Spinster to Self-Partnered
The term 'self-partnered’ doesn’t suggest that we have to be alone, rather it softly reminds us that there is a value in being with ourselves.
WWF (World Wide Funk)
Take an audio-visual trip through Funk's history across space and time. Brit-Funk, City Pop, Italo-Disco, Afrobeat, Samba Funk...we got it all! Reading: optional; Watching & listening: required!
A Political Ecology of Plastiglomerate in Kaʻū, Hawai’i
An inquiry into the plastics on Hawaiian shores that centers the colonized and occupied homelands on which these objects are formed
Weaponized Infrastructures
The Palestinian water crisis is not an unfortunate natural deficit—it is a deliberate program designed by the Israeli colonial regime to deprive people of a vital resource.
The Life Cycle of the Dollar Slice: Waste & Labor
Dollar pizza is that rare product that any class can enjoy, but when food is so cheap, who or what bears the externalities?
Guinea’s Ethnic Conflict
When West Africans resettle in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere, the tension disappears and they take on one identity, as Guinean, in a new foreign land. I am interested in exploring the factors that suddenly leads to unity and eventually the formation of a community in the foreign land but doesn’t seem to happen in their own home country.
Petra’s Promise: An Introduction
A collection of poems following the story of a young girl, Petra, and her trusty hound dog, Kosmos, as they navigate Campi Flegrei—the flaming “Phlegraean” fields in the south of Italy.
Petra’s Promise: Part I. Primeval Petra
High noon and/ sweat beads drip on marble swirls/ down in the market/ where chemise silks sway/ limpid in the springtime breeze
Part II. Petra Protector, 1538
Pozzuoli
Weeks, the roads rumble
out under feet passing
on Pozzuoli soil, streets
A gentle roll of the heel, a new
pleat in the pasture
All but one stroll openly,
pleasants, possessed in routine
except for
a Girl of fourteen …
Part III. Petra, Present
New York City, Museum of Natural History
Petra petrologist
stands in her lab
a Woman of forty,
a Woman well learned
holds old harmony in her Home
of some souls lived past, of
a Girl of four made from…
(De)(Re)Naturalizing the Caribbean
The similarities between the tourist industry today and settler presence in the Caribbean are striking: Both thrive on the idea that the Caribbean is a place that can (and should) be freely consumed, economically and visually, by Western people.
Plantation Vacation, Part II
What does it mean to both recognize the atrocities of slavery while engaging with the environments in which it occurred as spaces of leisure and romance?