CEE #40

ISSUE CONTENTS

Happy new year everyone!!  I hope 2023 has landed well, and that you are all looking forward to a fantastic year!  We are so excited to welcome our spring Fellows, Wazhmah Osman and Imani Uzuri (more on them below, and make sure to join us for our first Third Thursday of the semester when they will talk about their work, their courses, and their vision for the next few months)!  In the spirit of being intentional about goals and commitments for the coming year, I wanted to offer a few that will be foundational to our work at the CEE:  

1) we resolve to be present to and engaged with what is in front of us, rather than becoming distracted about what is on the horizon; 

2) we resolve to continue to create spaces of care for each other, and for those we may not even meet face-to-face; and, 

3) we resolve to celebrate the small victories, rather than to dwell in the challenges.  

Remember to hold May 1^st on your calendars for the CEE carnival, commemorating our first five years!

Deborah A. Thomas

Director, Center for Experimental Ethnography

Deborah A. Thomas
R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology
Director, Center for Experimental Ethnography

Imani Uzuri is a vocalist, composer and cultural worker who composes and researches music that reflects her rural North Carolina roots where she grew up singing Spirituals and line-singing hymns with her grandmother and extended family. Uzuri creates concerts, experimental theater, performance art, theater compositions and sound installations in international venues/festivals including Lincoln Center Out of Doors, New York’s Central Park SummerStage, Joe’s Pub, Public Theater, Performa Biennial, France’s Festival Sons d’hiver, Met Breuer, London’s ICA, and MoMA... >>READ MORE<<

While at CEE, Imani is teaching a course Embodied Ethnographies: performance art, ritual performance, and poetic praxis. This course will investigate embodied research modalities (from mundane to ethereal), performance praxis centering Blackness, Indigeneity, queerness and cultural practices outside of the western eurocentric gaze embedded with the politics of agency, marginality, identity, mythmaking, subversiveness and sacredness. >>MORE<<