UPCOMING TALKS & EVENTS

I'm scheduling my next talks and events for 2020 - 2021. I'm most interested in talks and workshops that deal with technology, design, inclusion, diversity, gender, art, and anthropology. Send me a message if you'd like to discuss your upcoming event. Please include a note about honorarium, travel, and code of conduct. Thanks!

Sample Talks

Cutting through the Archives of Erasure

How does one tell a story of the encounter with erasure? When some histories fall into the fog, and never gain a place in what is considered sanctioned historical narrative, how do we remember, engage, and interact? I consider these questions based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Miami with Latin American and Caribbean diasporic artists. In this essay I focus on Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez and Maria Martinez-Cañas, who both produce filmic works that present a reconsideration of the meaning and visualization of archives and history. In their work, Rodriguez and Martinez-Cañas cut, erase, scratch, color, and otherwise manipulate photographic and moving film to produce new images that disrupt the narratives of the archival materials, acting as palimpsests of artistic labor and archival collections. While archives are often endowed with power and preciousness, I show how these artists’ work confronts the meaning of archives and reveals the masked narratives that haunt the materiality of their work.

Watch the Symposium at Brown University (or skip ahead to my talk at about 41:00).

Mapping the Arts: Archives, Artists, and Digital Technologies

This talk focuses on the project I founded, Mapping Arts Project. I begin with a tour of the project, showing the workshop around the website via screenshots (it’s also online at mappingartsproject.org). Then I will discuss some of the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings surrounding the project and the related research. I will end with some thoughts on future plans for the project. The goal of the presentation is to start a conversation about practices and processes of historical, ethnographic, visual, and geographic research while working through both the theoretical and practical aspects of scholarship in the public sphere.

Listen to the talk as presented at Harvard University's Warren Center.

Think like an Anthropologist

Act like a Designer

Feel like a Human

Designing for people means understanding people, or at least trying to and then building products that suit them. Anthropologists study people from within seeking to grasp meaning and patterns. As an anthropologist for most of my career, I spent a lot of time talking with people and learning about what makes them, them. As a designer, I put those ideas into action. Rapidly. How can we bridge the gap between years-long ethnographic research and super fast design sprints while building products for people? Anthropology and design might seem like very distant cousins, but they are effective when used together. In this talk, I cover three main areas: thinking like an anthropologist, acting like a designer, and feeling like a human. These three areas together shape a design practice that is engaged with the people we are designing for while remaining grounded in purposeful actions.

Listen to the talk as presented at California State University.

Slide Deck available to view alongside the audio.

List of Past Talks

2018

Think like an Anthropologist | Act like a Designer | Feel like a Human
- Keynote for the Digital Humanities Colloquium Final Symposium
- California State University, Fullerton, December 12, 2018.

2016

Archival Hauntings: Mapping the Arts in Real Place/Digital Space
- Fourth Exposure, The Dark Room 4th Annual Race & Visual Culture Symposium
- Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, April 23, 2016.

2015

Looking Again: Race and Gender in the Practice of Ethnography and Photography
- Transatlantic Feminisms: The Familiarity of Multiple Oppressive Forces and Multiple Forms of Resistance in Black Women's Lives
- American Anthropological Association Meetings, Denver, CO, November 18 – 22, 2015.

Shooting in the Streets: Black Women Photographers and Documentary Practices 
- Photographing Existence in the Americas: Race, Gender, Migration, and the Diasporic Lens
- American Studies Association, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 8 – 11, 2015.

Cutting through the Archives of Erasure
- Writing the Undercommons, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, April 22, 2015.
- Watch the talk.

Palm Trees and Billboards: Navigating the Tropics in Art and Anthropology
- Third Exposure, The Dark Room 3rd Annual Race & Visual Culture Symposium, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, April 11, 2015.

2014

Photography as Transnational Social Practice: Black Photographers and the Representation the Past and Present
 - Legacies of Race and Space, American Anthropological Association Meetings, Washington, DC, December 3 – 7, 2014.

Mapping the Arts: Archives, Artists, and Digital Technologies
- Warren Center for the Humanities, Harvard University, October 9, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2014.
- Listen to the talk.

Making and Unmaking of Caribbean Space in Miami’s Art Worlds
- Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, May 8, 2014.

Documenting Folks and Leaving Evidence: Photography as Transnational Social Practice
- Second Exposure Symposium, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, April 24 – 25, 2014.

Making and Unmaking of Caribbean Space in Miami’s Art Worlds
- Art Imaginaries, American Ethnological Society and Society for Visual Anthropology Spring Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, April 10 – 12, 2014.

Space and Place: A discussion about Edward Bannister
- Digital History, and Diasporic Arts in Providence, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, April 17, 2014.

2013

Arts and Place in Anthropology, Art, and New Media Projects
- Center for Public Humanities, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, September 19, 2013.

Mapping the Arts in the Digital Humanities, GeoHumanities: Drawing New Connections in Time & Space
- FIU GIS Day 2013, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, March 29, 2013.          

Practice & Process in the Mapping Arts Project
- Pecha Kucha: Practice & Process, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, March 16, 2013.

2012

Artists Engage the Landscape: Migrations and Becoming in Diaspora
- Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami, Miami, Florida, November 30, 2012.

I'm From the Field: Miami as Home and Fieldsite
- The Ethnographer's Craft: Works inspired by Ruth Behar, American Anthropological Association Meetings, San Francisco, California, November 14 – 18, 2012.

Mapping Miami, a public art and archive project
- Miami’s Cultural Terrains, XXX International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, San Francisco, California, May 23 – 26, 2012.

Tracing the Terrain of Contemporary Caribbean Art in Miami, Florida
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, April 13, 2012.

History, Memory, and Performance in Contemporary Black Photographic Practice: Noelle Théard and Donnalyn Anthony
- Performing History, Memory, and Identity in the Black World, Central Pennsylvania Consortium Africana Studies Conference, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, February 23 – 24, 2012.

2011

Performativity in the Visual Art of the Caribbean Diaspora: Traces, Actions, and Social Practice in the Work of Noelle Theárd, Antonia Wright, and Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez
- Tracing Performance Aesthetics in Africa, the Caribbean, and their Diasporas: History Making, Public Art, Social Practice, and Subjectivity, American Anthropological Association Meetings, Montreal, Quebec, November 16 – 20, 2011.

Artists Mapping Miami
- Vizcaya Museum and Gardens’ Contemporary Art Projects, Miami, Florida, March 30, 2011.

2010

Photography and Memory: Reconstructing the Family Album in the Works of Cuban-born Artists Nereida García-Ferraz and Elizabeth Cerejido 
- Stories of Migration and Migration Stories, American Anthropological Association Meetings, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 16 – 21, 2010.

Photography and Memory: Reconstructing the Family Album – Elizabeth Cerejido and Nereida García-Ferraz
- Global Caribbean(s): Interrogating the Politics of Location in Caribbean Literature and Culture, University of Miami and the Little Haiti Cultural Center, Miami, Florida, March 3 – 6, 2010.

2008

Social Relationships and the Production of Art: Toward an Anthropology of Caribbean Women Artists in Miami, Florida
- American Anthropological Association Meeting: Inclusion, Collaboration and Engagement, San Francisco, California, November 19 – 23, 2008.

Performance in the Archive: Re-imagining the Cuban Diaspora and Contemporary Cuban Art through the Performance-based Photography of María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Marta Maria Peréz Bravo
- Virtual Caribbeans: A Conference on Representation, Diaspora and Performance in and on the Caribbean, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, February 27 – March 1, 2008.

2007

Caribbean Migration: Patterns, Experiences, and Expressions
- 32nd Annual Caribbean Studies Association Conference: “Alternative Interpretations of the Circum-Caribbean: Interrogating Connections across History, Society, Culture, and Performance.” Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, May 28 – June 1, 2007.