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Date: Thursday, April 28th
Time: 1:00pm est
Radical Remembering: Remediating Historic Monuments with Digital Media
teams.microsoft.com
Committee: Drs. Susana Morris (chair), Andre Brock, Gregory Zinman, and Heidi Cooley (UT Dallas)
Abstract:
This country is filled with monuments that hold historic or ahistorical values that cause people to revere the site and the histories they represent. These sites explicitly and implicitly disappear events, artifacts, and even the people who also represent the histories of place. Southern forgetting is the strategic removal of histories of the past through the removal of ephemera, educational tools, and physical infrastructures that disappear various histories, particularly of marginalized people. Radical remembering is the remediation of this forgetting through the use of cultural memory, historic artifacts, archival research, and art. What can digital media offer to historical monuments and cultural sites that combat “southern forgetting” and facilitate a radical remembering of various histories that are outside of the stories that we are repetitively being told? The affordances of new media allow for agility in location, site-specificity, and meaningful interaction between the site and visitors. Grounded in the theories and ethics of Black feminist thought, my dissertation considers the visual cultures and archives that impact digital technologies and new media productions at and as Black cultural sites. My research also uses post-phenomenological case studies to determine how we change through the use of different technologies and we change technologies in Black cultural spaces. By engaging in these modes of inquiry I will use Cultural Memory and Archival Methodology to create a historic monument of the 1881 Atlanta Washer Woman Strike in order to facilitate a type of remembering as it seeks to connect people to the event and the fragments of knowledge that they might already have around the themes of protest, organizing, and activities on Auburn Avenue.
