The dissertation project considers the generative possibilities to envision Black subjectivity that emerges from a sustained consideration of different forms of difficult racial and sexual intimacies. The artists whose work is engaged throughout the project, Leasho Johnson, Ajamu X, and NIC Kay recognize that to be Black is to always...
In the wake of environmental catastrophe, active intervention is needed to heal trauma, resist erasure, and navigate changing communities. Focusing on New Orleans after the federal levee failures following Hurricane Katrina, this dissertation looks across a diverse mix of case studies to theorize how communities utilize performance to navigate mass...
Musical meter is often described as an objective grid-like system of time-points that is created by musical sounds. I define meter instead as any pattern of felt beats an individual listener chooses to hear, a physical and cognitive interpretation of the music that is (re-) created in the moment of...
In a political climate where it is assumed that there are no alternatives to capitalism, architectural design and design-based activism are often heralded as providing solutions to capitalism’s negative effects. This dissertation is concerned with how contemporary architectural design naturalizes the organization of racial capitalist labor as it purports to...