I am currently assisting PhD student Jessica Luo in her research of the Sanmen Wu sound system, a language of the Wu family found in Southeast China. As Jessica writes an article that summarizes the sound structure of Sanmen Wu, I analyze utterances produced by speakers of the language. In my self-guided research, I focus on the sound quality of the consonants and their variations to determine underlying pronunciation. I also connect these variations to historical sound changes from Middle Chinese, its ancestor, into Sanmen Wu. I observe that Sanmen Wu speakers tend to freely alter pronunciations of certain consonants. For example, a speaker may say 部 [pu] or [bu] meaning ‘part,’ the latter only appearing after another spoken word. These two syllables contrast only in voicing, where [p] is voiceless and [b] is voiced. I use Praat, an industry-standard speech-analysis program, to read diagrams that depict the acoustics of these consonants to verify my findings. I am also creating a set of rules that predicts this alternation. One of the conditions is as follows: words with alternating voicing in their consonants change when pronounced within a sentence (‘medially’). Eventually, I will explain these rules, and I predict my explanation is related to the evolution of Sanmen Wu into its current stage. I reason that because the Wu language family stems from Middle Chinese, both of which require contrastive voicing to create distinct words, Sanmen Wu also contains the original underlying variation that exists in Middle Chinese. As such, I attribute this variation to an inherent part of the language rather than random circumstance. Ultimately, I intend to foster a thorough understanding of Sanmen Wu phonology and provide a foundation for further exploration of this topic.

“In Africa, whenever an old man dies, a library burns down.” –Amadou Hampâté Bâ. Malian writer, historian, and ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s quote underlines elders as keepers and purveyors of knowledge, culture, and wisdom. As “libraries” worth prioritizing and preserving, Black grandmothers’ stories and cultural inheritances (material possessions, cultural traditions, rituals, language, etc.) have been integral to the matriarchal traditions and culture characterizing people of African descent. Yet, at key periods, African Americans have experienced threats to our collective ability to document, preserve, and pass down our “libraries” because of a lack of financial resources and technological support. Black grandmothers experience multidimensional oppressions and rarely have a chance for self-representation. What are the ways black grandmothers experience erasure in the digital age, and within their communities through displacement? How are we responding? How can researchers mitigate, document, and disrupt their erasure? To conduct this work, we collect oral histories, document cultural inheritances, and create data visualizations to digitize their "libraries." We document, preserve, and amplify Black culture and history by sharing the lived experiences of Black grandmothers. The Black Grandmother Worldmaking Library is a collaborative, community-based model for gathering, archiving, and digitizing distinct aspects of our “libraries” beginning with the stories and cultural inheritances of Black grandmothers experiencing mass displacement in Seattle’s Central District and along the Gullah Geechee Corridor. The project offers a readily accessible digital resource for Black grandmothers to contribute to and control the stories we tell about their lives. The Black Grandmother Worldmaking Library aims to repair what we are taught about Black grandmothers, to reclaim their narratives and culture using firsthand accounts, and to preserve their legacies.

The title of this project references Stuart Hall’s memoir, Familiar Strangers and encapsulates the experience many artists have when portraying family members they have never met but feel like they know through photographs. Drawing from Tina Campt’s definition of the haptic–how viewers touch or are touched by family photos–I look to Black artists’ uses of photos to express their relationship to themes of family, diaspora, memory, and history. How do Black artists use hapticity and embodiment to engage with family photos and produce alternative ways of conceptualizing identity? How do they view family photos as sites of memory activation? Why and when have these artists returned to family photos as source material?  This focus on hapticity reveals how Black visual artists recreate, re-enact, and revise family photos in their work to produce micro-histories that might otherwise be lost. I analyze artist statements, arts and culture literature, and academic articles to identify individual artists’ approaches to family archives. The featured 19 artists span the African diaspora, and I use Safia Elhillo’s home is not a country as a framework to situate the socio-political contexts of their work, which include the legacy of transatlantic slavery, transnational migration, diaspora, colonialism, racial apartheid. Many of the artists have gained significant attention as they portray family history and collective memory in their practice. This work can guide future exhibitions and continue the ongoing conversation on family photography in Black visual art.

This study utilizes design research to explore how storytelling informs the design, usage, and knowledge production of a digital archive repository housing digitized memory objects. Ranging from ao dai to math booklets, these memory objects are grounded by narratives of Vietnamese diasporic identity and experiences shared by community researchers as part of Sarah Nguyen’s Sharing Stories, Sharing Trust (SSST) workshop series. To understand how story-driven approaches translate and transform digital archive design, I draw upon multiple methodologies such as case study analysis of existing community-based applications of digital archives and thematic analysis of SSST workshop discussions (formatted as observational memos). I also draw from user interviews with community researchers using a semi-structured, narrative-driven protocol. These analyses inform the design of a digital repository prototype that foregrounds story-driven design whilst exploring possibilities for the preservation and sharing of Vietnamese diasporic experiences.

Zanele Muholi is a queer, Black, nonbinary South African photographer who produces work depicting the lived emotional experiences of Black queer South Africans, specifically highlighting individuals who have lived through corrective sexual abuse. While corrective abuse against queer and Black people has been documented throughout the art historical canon, many depictions acknowledge only the physical pain, completely omitting the emotional toll this abuse causes. Acknowledgement of the range of emotion of queer and Black individuals in the art world is unfortunately extremely limited, especially when considering depiction of victimized forms; however, Zanele Muholi creates artwork that counters this inadequacy. Through the medium of black and white photography, captured with a “loving” lens, Muholi subverts the concept of corrective sexual abuse by emphasizing the true emotional impact it has through a focus on facial expression and body language, humanizing their subjects to decolonize and reclaim the long-exploited image of the black body from historical degradation under apartheid; they simultaneously challenge accepted gender presentation by depicting queer South Africans who fall outside of the accepted gender binary, making unavoidable the humanity of those who have endured this kind of abuse. Muholi’s work is intended for a wide audience; they want to provide an avenue for queer Black individuals to see themselves in the art world, however; they also want their work to be experienced by those who may be unaware of their communities’ struggles to humanize them to the world. By examining a selection of Muholi’s works alongside historical and contemporary examples of Black pain, and investigating responses to the artist, this paper proves that Muholi’s work questions how Black pain is depicted in media and pushes the boundaries of accepted gender presentation and sexual orientation in the museum space, ultimately creating a fuller picture of the queer Black lived experience.