Venn Vision Grant Recipients

Photographic Futures
Kimberly Juanita Brown (English & Creative Writing)
Martina Broner (Spanish & Portuguese)
Tory Jeffay (Film & Media Studies)
Photographic Futures explores the ways in which photography can serve as a meaning-making tool at a critical time for racial justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and environmental change. Across a range of contexts, our research inquires into the potential of photography to make sense of the past, imagine possible futures, and enact new political possibilities.  As we consider how images produce new definitions of family (Brown), evidence (Jeffay), and environment (Broner), our projects both engage with and propose new methods to interpret photographs.

Chinese Cinema History Project
Mark Williams (Film & Media Studies)
Miya Qiong Xie (ASCL)
Yi Lu (History)
Bringing together faculties from three disciplines -- film studies, literature, and history -- this project will build a curated collection of Chinese visual media and study their aesthetic and sociopolitical impact and legacy.  Our project will offer a series of critical perspectives about how visual culture frames China's understanding of its identity and place in the world.

Intermedial sounding: Conversations on Race, Media, and the Senses
Yiren Zheng (ASCL)
Allie Martin (Music)
Andrew Simon (Middle Eastern Studies)
As a group, we facilitate interdisciplinary conversations on the intersections between sound, race, and media. We bring together expertise in ethnomusicology, Black Studies, geography, digital humanities, literary studies, cultural anthropology, environmental humanities, East Asian studies, and Middle Eastern Studies to generate new inquiries about sound and the senses with special attentiveness to untold histories and stories in a wide range of historical periods across culture as well as to forms, insights, and practices in non-western contexts.

Infrastructures of Race, Knowledge, and Aesthetics
Sujin Eom (ASCL)
Erin Collins (Geography)
Preeti Singh (ASCL)
Thinking with infrastructures, thisinterdisciplinary body of scholarship sheds light on infrastructure, not only as a passive circuit, but as an active mechanism through which things, ideas, people, and social relations are produced and circulated.  Our group advances this scholarly discussion while suggesting new ways of reading and thinking about infrastructure. Each member of the group approaches the shared topic from productively different disciplinary perspectives–from oceanic and material infrastructures to infrastructural imaginaries–and with distinct spatio-temporal sensibilities–from postcolonial India to the Pacific Ocean and the socialist empire.