What role do images play in sustaining colonialism as a sociopolitical, economic, and ideological power system today—both in the discipline of anthropology and beyond? What role do images play in decolonization—in contesting, undoing, resisting, or refusing (neo)colonial and/or (neo)imperial, white supremacist projects

Through a series of workgroup meetings culminating in a symposium, participants in this project seek to stage an interdisciplinary intervention across anthropological subdisciplines and allied fields. We aim to demonstrate how situated, critical approaches to images can be extended by and contribute to shared concerns across archaeology, material culture studies, Black Feminist perspectives, postcolonial/decolonial studies, race/ethnicity studies, media/film studies, and studies of art. Together, we show the ways that images are not a niche or narrow concern relevant only to those who self-identify as visual or multimodal scholars. Instead, images play a crucial function in shaping and socializing aesthetic experience across sites, media, and modalities—both past and present, both human and more-than-human.

Our goal is to explore the potential role that a critical attention to images can play in deconstructing the visual and discursive logics of colonialism/coloniality in societies and scholarly habits that far too often remain rooted in modern, gendered-racial-capitalist (Sweeney 2021), and white-supremacist structures.

Project Director: 
Joshua Babcock, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Brown University

Collaborators:
Jordi Rivera Prince, Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Brown University
Suzie Telep, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

QUEER DURATIONS is envisioned as a multidisciplinary and cross-departmental collaboration involving separate but interlinked scholarly, curricular, curatorial, and artistic components, clustered around works of body-based performance art grappling with duration as an aesthetic mode. The project will culminate in a 3-day symposium scheduled for December 5-7, 2024 featuring panels and presentations by artists, scholars, and curators as well as presentation/performances of several works of durational performance art.

The symposium is intended to investigate why duration has been a powerful artistic and performative modality for investigations of queerness, embodiment, and disability. QUEER DURATIONS is tied to an upcoming exhibition of new work by artist Julie Tolentino (who works across installation, video, and durational performance art), already currently scheduled for the Cohen Gallery at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts in November/December 2024.Tolentino will be a Brown Arts Institute Professor of the Practice for the Fall 2024 semester.

Project Directors and Collaborators:
Leon Hilton, Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies
Julie Tolentino, Professor of the Practice in the Arts, Depts. Of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies, Modern Culture & Media, Brown Arts Institute
Thea Quiray Tagle, Associate Curator, David Winton Bell Gallery and Brown Arts Institute
J Dellacave, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies

Graduate Student Collaborators:
JD Stokely, Amber Hawk Swanson, Cecilia Azar

Reproductive Entanglements: Black Women Fighting for Bodily Autonomy will focus on the early reproductive justice work of Black women involved in the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) in the late 1930s through early 1950s, including Mary McLeod Bethune and Dr. Dorothy Ferebee. Using secondary and primary source, the proposed project will address the following primary research question: How did Black women working as part of the NCNW promote Black women’s, girls’, and birthing people’s right to have children, to not have children, and to “nurture the children they have in a safe and healthy environment” in the South, North, and Midwest during the mid-20th century? The objective of the project is to elucidate the deep roots of Black women’s reproductive justice activism across the U.S. and identify the approaches, strategies, networks, and resources that Black women leveraged to advance bodily autonomy in the context of racism, sexism, capitalism, and imperialism, all of which persist today.
Further, in order to examine the implications of this research in the context of current, escalating assaults on bodily autonomy rooted in racism, sexism, and transphobia, all of which are interconnected, we will also conduct 10 key-informant interviews with leaders of contemporary reproductive justice organizations across the U.S. Specifically, we will ask them about their views and experiences engaging in reproductive justice work in the midst of rising abortion and gender-affirming care bans. This aspect of the project will allow us to identify similarities and differences in past and present reproductive justice efforts and also better understand how reproductive justice leaders engage with the issue of bodily autonomy for transgender and nonbinary birthing people, whose reproductive health needs and experiences have historically largely been ignored. The project will engage others through a reproductive justice panel comprised of three reproductive justice scholars and activists open to the public and a reproductive justice lunch workshop for undergraduate and graduate students led by one of the panelists.

Project Director: 
Madina Agénor, Associate Professor of Behavioral and Social
Sciences and Epidemiology, Brown University School of Public Health

Collaborators: 
Emily Owens, David and Michelle Ebersman Associate Professor History, Brown University
Sarah Gamble, Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Brown University

We propose an interdisciplinary social science research project to examine the current role that women play in conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and negotiations around humanitarian access in MENA, and more importantly, how the women occupying these roles view their work. The research team will ask the following interrelated questions: 

1. How does the role of women in these positions differ across states and conflicts in the MENA region? How do they differ along lines of sexuality, ethnicity, and citizenship?
2. How do women of varying identities view their roles and the broader WPS agenda?
3. How do local instances of WPS programs connect to the broader transnational movement around women’s participation in governance? 

The goal of this research is to better understand how governments, the UN, and humanitarian organizations can better encourage the involvement of diverse women in all aspects of peace and security.

In order to answer these questions, we would conduct an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods project on the evolution and adoption of the WPS agenda in the MENA region with a special focus on local communities. By utilizing in-depth interviews, a survey, and desk research, the research team plans to examine how an international agenda instantiates itself locally, what kinds of meaning negotiations occur during these instantiations, and how such lo

Project Director:
Adam C. Levine, Director, Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies
Professor of Emergency Medicine and Health Services, Policy & Practice, Associate Dean of Global Health Equity, Warren Alpert Medical School

Collaborator:
Alexandria J. Nylen, Political Science Research Faculty, Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies