All Thanks to Olivia Pope
I decided to go into academia at a panel about Scandal. It was 2015 and I was a college senior.
Like millions of other fans, one weekly joy was Shonda Rhimes’ Thursday night primetime takeover: Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder. The thrill of these Thursdays was not only the juicy and ridiculous plots, but the chance to see dynamic stories of Black women on television. Between my friends, my mom, grandma, and Black Twitter as a whole -- we all had something to say. Yall remember the episode when Olivia is kidnapped, locked in a basement of sorts, but her hair remains frizz and kink-free?
The Shondaland symposium, hosted on my campus, brought together Black women scholars from an array of academic disciplines ( History, Women’s Studies, Law, Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Black Diaspora Studies, and Media Studies) to discuss this beloved tv takeover. As speakers framed the moment, I learned how historic this cultural production was. There hadn’t been a Black woman lead on primetime TV in more than forty years. That day I entered a great cipher (as Gwendolyn Pough would call it)… brilliant Black feminists came together in the intellectual and honest riffing of ideas. The discussions were, of course, genius. No stone went unturned. These scholars took up everything from what it meant to envision a Black woman with the power to run the State, how Rhimes’ complex characters transcend archetypes of Black womanhood, to Black women's still unprotected status under the law. The panelists engaged in the more pressing issues too: Fitz or Jake?, favorite sex scenes, hand-bags, petticoats, and iconic Poppa Pope speeches. Between giggles, I feverishly jotted down notes.
In the humanities, we take up questions pertinent to the dynamism of personhood and complexity politics. Yet, Black women are often left out of the mix. By senior year of college, I had come to know that I loved the humanities. This moment was the moment I learned that the humanities could love me back.
ShondaLand Symposium
2015
Sarah Scriven, 26, PhD Student in Women's Studies
all-thanks-to-olivia-pope
The Beginning of Something Brilliant
The Glasscock Summer Scholars programs is a project that falls in the realm of the humanities. Specifically, my project deals with social psychology. So in the summer, after attending a two week seminar on marginalized groups and individuals, it was time to decide what my topic would be on. On that day, I met Gabe Miller, a sociology grad student, who signed up to help me along with my advisor, Dr. Adrienne Carter-Sowell. So we brainstormed a bunch of ideas and started narrowing down topics.
We settled on seeing if social media sites can be used as a coping mechanism for African Americans who are racially discriminated against in order to protect their mental health. The process of coming to this topic was great! It was the first time that I really put what I had learned in that two week seminar to practical use which was exciting since social psychology is not my area of expertise. In that moment I knew that we had found something special. Several months later, we are now nearing the end of this thesis journey and it all started with that brainstorming session.
The source comes from an honorary thesis that I have been working on through the Glasscock Summer Scholars program at Texas A&M. This program gives students the opportunity to create an honorary thesis and gain research experience as undergrads.
Summer 2019
Lincoln El-Amin, English major at Texas A&M University
beginning-something-brilliant
Algorithms in Funk Music
Late scholar James A. Snead wrote that repetition in Black American creative expression is most prevalent in performance such as rhythm in music, dance and language. He used James Brown's "Cold Sweat" to demonstrate this, revealing the algorithmic design of the song. <br /><br />This helped me connect the cultural arts to technology, specifically through computation and machine learning, which is a type of artificial intelligence. It also influenced my work as a scholar and as an artist. I noticed that software generated patterns from "Cold Sweat" look like African and African American textiles, linking funk and even hip-hop to Kuba cloth and quilts.
James Brown's "Cold Sweat"
2017
Nettrice Gaskins, artist, researcher, educator
algorithms-funk-music