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Emerging Scholars Roundtable: Thinking Creatively through COVID (Aug. 20, 2022)

Tab Wonn pou Chèchè Emèjan: Panse avèk Kreyativite Diran Peryòd COVID

Table ronde des chercheur.es émergent.es : Penser de manière créative grâce à la COVID


View Recorded Livestream



English

Kreyòl

Français


Saturday, August 20, 2022

2:00-4:00 pm EDT (11:00am PDT, 1:00pm CDT, 8:00pm CET)

The Emerging Scholars committee of the Haitian Studies Association invite you to participate in our series of mentorship activities where we will reflect on key topics and issues for emerging scholars.

In August, we will present how scholars reclaimed their time during the pandemic, learned new skills, and created new initiatives that enhanced their personal and professional lives.  We will also discuss how to highlight new COVID talents for prospective job and research opportunities.

The moderated discussion will be in English with translation and followed by Kreyol summary between panelists.


Panelists:

Dr. Schvalla Rivera

Schvalla R. Rivera, Ph.D., CDE currently serves as the Associate Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, Chief Diversity Officer and Senior Advisor to the President at Grinnell College. With 18 years of experience in higher education administration, Dr. Rivera has experience in fields such as residence Life, multicultural student affairs, international student affairs, and academic advising. 


Valérie Déus

Valérie Déus is a poet, film programmer and radio show host. Her work has been featured in Minnesota Women’s Press, The Brooklyn Rail, Midway, the St. Paul Almanac, The BeZine and most recently in A Garden of Black Joy anthology and Under Purple Skies: A Minneapolis Anthology. When she’s not writing, she is the host of Project 35, a local low-fi radio show featuring music from all over the diaspora and poetry on KRSM radio. She curates FilmNorth’s Cinema Lounge and is the Shorts Programmer for the Provincetown International Film Festival.


Dr. Synatra Smith

Dr. Synatra Smith is an Afrofuturist cultural preservationist focused on the ways in which Black cultural landscapes transform access to special collections and archives through a Black speculative methodology that utilizes extended reality (XR) and other digital humanities tools. In her postdoctoral fellowship, she recently launched a project entitled Sacred Geographic Superimpositions (bit.ly/sacredgs), which is a spiritual scholarly endeavor to document and celebrate ephemeral Black public art in Philadelphia in a manner that transports them into the ancestral plane of the “transformative archive” to bring scholarly research and data curation out of the academy into a curated space grounded in storytelling and interpretation through story mapping and augmented reality (AR). Dr. Smith has also co-developed a mapping visualization entitled Philly Necrofutures (bit.ly/phillynecrofutures) to combine art historical research with data curation and visualization to address under-resourced Black collections at predominantly white institutions. Additionally, she has been researching Black artists in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Temple University Libraries Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, and other local organizations to enhance their digital visibility through linked open data.


Dr. Joyce Marie Jackson

Joyce Marie Jackson is Chair of the Department of Geography & Anthropology and former Director of African & African American Studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.  Dr. Jackson also holds the James J. Parsons Endowed Professorship at LSU. She earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington in folklore-ethnomusicology and her core research centers on African and African diaspora performance-centered ritual studies including, the Black masking Indians and the Baptist Easter Rock in Louisiana; carnivalesque identities and community sustainability in Trinidad and Haiti; and women’s healing rituals in the Lebou ethnic group in the northwest region of Sénégal, West Africa. In addition to her West African research, she has directed the LSU in Sénégambia and Haiti Academic Study Abroad Programs.  As a cultural ethnographer, her research and publications have also scanned the genres of gospel, blues and traditional jazz.


Dr. Petrouchka Moïse (Moderator)

Dr. Moïse is the latest addition to the Grinnell College Libraries as their Asst. Professor / Cultural & Community-Based Digital Curator. She is currently a 2020-24 CLIR/Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Haitian Visual Arts.  She works jointly with the Grinnell College Library and the Waterloo Center for the Arts. Dr. Moïse will play a central role in coordinating the Haitian Art Digital Crossroads project (HADC). The HADC aims to make the Haitian art collection of the Waterloo Center for the Arts, the largest publicly held collection of Haitian art in the world, digitally accessible as a preparatory study for the creation of a digital hub for a network of online resources in Haitian and Caribbean studies. In addition to managing this project, she will collaborate with cultural and academic institutes within Haiti and the Diaspora to build awareness of this collection as she develops her ‘mitan-morphic’ theory.