What are the emotional and political stakes of knowledge production? How can queer and trans communities of color reject transparency to better protect themselves and their cultural production? What might drag and voguing teach us about entanglement of performance, politics, and performance?
In episode 55 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach talks with professor and artist Shaka McGlotten about the passionate relationship we often have to the things that we study as well as how that always necessitates both desire and loss, how students can harness the power of Afrofuturism and speculation to combat white supremacy and climate change, and how queer and trans communities of color can use voguing, drag, and what Shaka calls “Black Data” to imagine and create new worlds.
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Guest: Shaka McGlotten
Shaka McGlotten is a social anthropologist with a background in the fine arts. Their work brings together the theoretical insights of queer studies with the methodological toolkit of anthropology to consider new media technologies in relation to queer cultures.
They have published and lectured on public sex, online cultures, pornography, gaming, zombies, human waste, voguing, and more.
Their first book, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality, was published by SUNY Press in 2013. They are the co-editor of two edited collections, Black Genders and Sexualities (with Dana-ain Davis) and Zombie Sexuality (with Steve Jones). Currently they are at work on two book projects: The Political Aesthetics of Drag and Black Data: Queer of Color Critique Meets Network Culture Studies.
In 2014 they were the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Award for Experienced Researchers and in 2017 and 2018 they are a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude.
We chatted about
- Shaka’s fellowship with the Akademie Schloss Solitude (02:24)
- Disrupting traditional academic writing (05:55)
- The origins of the Political Aesthetics of Drag and Black Data (07:50)
- Shaka’s thoughts on the entanglement of performance and technology (13:45)
- The entwined nature of desire and ethnographic research (17:55)
- Imagining otherwise (25:53)
Takeaways
The importance of interdisciplinary creative community
Akademie Schloss Solitude is a cultural arts institution in Stuttgart [Germany]. It’s been there for 35-odd years. When it began, it was a residency fellowship program for artists, but they’ve since expanded it to include other kinds of scholars and artists and people who bridge the two like me there as well. The people there are from all over and all of them are enormously creative. Many of these artists that I spent time with this summer would work in any medium that would get their point across and I was literally blown away. It was inspiring in a way that even produced certain kinds of crises, as I thought about my own practice—wanting to to return to more of a visual arts practice but also reflecting on the kind of changes that I’m making in own writing style as I move away from traditional academic writing.
Disrupting traditional academic writing
I discovered Trinh T. Minh-ha’s writing at the very end of my time as an undergraduate. What she was doing blew me away and it was the model I had been looking for for my own work. I was really lucky to encounter work like that….Then in graduate school [at the University of Texas at Austin], I worked with Katie Stewart [and] with Sandy Stone….It’s a disruptive practice in the academy and maybe also an activist practice in its own way. I think about texts like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s Undercommons too…that book bent my brain in new ways and provided a sort of model for working and writing from some perspective that was within and also lateral to the academy.
Drag as a political intervention
The Political Aesthetics of Drag began in a gay bar in Jerusalem….I was struck by a moment in which [a performer] completely upset our expectations about what an Israeli is expected or permitted to say in the contemporary political climate of Israel. So that was part of the birth of that project, this way that drag could work not only with gender and the performativity of gender but could make interventions in politics that were enabled precisely because of the liminal position of people who perform in drag.
The entanglement of performance and technology
As an anthropologist, I was trained to pay attention to how people are using things. I came of intellectual age at the end of the 1990s, and all of those conversations that emerged from British cultural and media studies—I’m still working with them. I’m still working with identity, with performance, with their intersection in political spheres. I’m also just interested in the basic materiality of how people are using these objects and interacting with one another as a result.
The intertwining of desire and ethnography
When I was working on my dissertation, I was trying on some level to write a celebratory account of histories of public sex in Austin and all of the ways that new technologies were providing affordances for people to connect for love and sex. Of course, the more I studied this, the more I realized that these histories were profoundly impacted by HIV/AIDS, that the people I worked with were really suffering and are still suffering a decade later (and two decades later in some cases) as the result of HIV/AIDS. The closer I came into contact with that, the more intense it was. Of course I had to work through that intellectually, but there was no way for me not to work through it personally as well.
Writing and/as meditation
This is going to sound so cheesy, but when I sit down to practice meditation, my intention is of two parts, which some people have said is actually the same thing. It’s about freedom and love. I love—however excruciating it can be—I love the practice of writing. I want to connect with the people that I am writing for. I do feel that I am writing as much for other people as I am writing for myself. As a way of working through ideas or almost as a service.
Imagining otherwise
I’m teaching a class this semester called New Black Ethnographies. In the past, I’ve given students a range of work that are not so new like Zora Neale Hurston or W.E.B. DuBois, and they’ve then done ethnographic projects about schooling, Black hair, and Black businesses. But this year, I’ve given them a different task. I’ve asked them to create Afrofuturist ethnographies, or speculative ethnographies. They were to write about and study topics as anthropologists from the future. They could either conduct this ethnographic field work in that future world in which they actually live or in a time travel process where they come back, and they each created their own project. Each of them imagined a different kind of world…Whatever work I’m doing, I’m so inspired by the work of students like this who help me imagine otherwise.
More from Shaka McGlotten
- Shaka’s faculty webpage
- Shaka’s fellow page at Akademie Schloss Solitude
- Shaka’s book Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality
- Shaka on Twitter
Projects and people discussed
- Akademie Schloss Solitude
- Jean-Baptiste Joly
- Creative Capital
- Trinh T. Minh-ha
- Kathleen Stewart
- Sandy Stone
- The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
- Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
- RuPaul’s Drag Race
- Paris Is Burning (film)
- Cultural studies
- Butch Queens Up in Pumps by Marlon M. Bailey
- Vogue/Voguing
- Audre Lorde
- Gloria E. Anzaldúa
- Octavia Butler
- Esther Newton
- Autoethnography
- Zora Neale Hurston
- W.E.B. DuBois
About Imagine Otherwise
Imagine Otherwise is a podcast about the people and projects bridging art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Episodes offer in-depth interviews with creators who use culture for social justice, and explore the nitty-gritty work of imagining and creating more just worlds. Check out full podcast episodes and show notes at ideasonfire.net/imagine-otherwise-podcast. Imagine Otherwise is produced by Ideas on Fire, an academic editing and consulting agency helping progressive, interdisciplinary scholars write and publish awesome texts, enliven public conversations, and create more just worlds.
Transcript
Cathy Hannabach [00:03]: [upbeat music in background] Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, the podcast about the people and projects bridging art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Episodes offer in-depth interviews with creators who use culture for social justice and explore the nitty-gritty work of imagining otherwise. I’m your host, Cathy Hannabach. [music fadeout]
[00:23] This is episode 55 and my guest today is Shaka McGlotten. Shaka is a social anthropologist with a background in the fine arts. Their work brings together the theoretical insights of queer studies with the methodological toolkit of anthropology to consider new media technologies in relation to queer cultures. They’ve published and lectured on topics as wide ranging as public sex, online cultures, pornography, gaming, zombies, human waste, voguing, and more. Shaka’s first book, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality, was published by SUNY Press in 2013. There are also the co-editor of two edited collections, one called Black Genders and Sexualities, co-edited with Dána-Ain Davis and another called Zombie Sexuality, co-edited with Steve Jones. Currently they’re at work on two book projects: The Political Aesthetics of Drag and Black Data: Queer of Color Critique Meets Network Culture studies. In 2014, Shaka was the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Award for Experienced Researchers and in 2017 and 2018, they are a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude.
In our interview, Shaka and I discuss the erotic relationship we often have to the things that we study as well as how that always necessitates both desire and loss, how students can harness the power of Afrofuturism and speculation to combat white supremacy and climate change, and how queer and trans communities of color use voguing, drag, and what Shaka called Black data to imagine and create new worlds.
[02:03] [to Shaka] Thank you so much for being with us today.
Shaka McGlotten: Thanks for having me.
Cathy: So let’s start with talking about some of your current work. You’re currently a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that institution and the projects that you’re developing there?
Shaka [02:22]: Sure. So, Akademie Schloss Solitude is a cultural arts institution in Stuttgart and it’s been there for 35-odd years. When it began, it was really an artist fellowship, a residency program for artists, but they’ve since expanded it. So you’ll find other kinds of scholars and artists and people who kind of bridged the two like me there as well. The people are from all over. All of them are enormously creative. Many of the artists that I spent time with this summer work in any medium that help them get their point across. And I was literally blown away. It was inspiring in a way that even produced certain kinds of crises as I thought about my own practice and wanting to both return to a more of a visual arts practice, but also the sort of changes that I’m making in my writing styl—moving away from traditional academic writing than I have in the past to think about kinds of writing that could extend beyond the text on a page.
[03:31] So moving things into the real world in the form of material artifacts or into the virtual world through web-based media. The fellowship was to work on both my drag book and my Black data book and it was a very open. So the director, Jean-Baptiste Joly, was very clear. This is a place for people to come and think and work and we could do anything or nothing. So I spent a lot of time talking about both of those books with people laying on the lawn or sharing a coffee after lunch or walking in the woods. Akademie Schloss Solitude, as I said, provided me with a space and some time to work and being able to interact with all of these amazing artists.
[04:25] I’ve also been really fortunate to be recently awarded a Creative Capital Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant, which I applied to and I did this in conversation with all of my fellow fellows at Akademie Schloss Solitude. I was really lucky, really lucky to be awarded it and I thought it was a bit of a long shot as an anthropologist to apply for a grant about arts writers. But I learned maybe a week and a half ago that I was awarded the grant. So I’ve been super, super fortunate to get support for these various projects. And three years ago I was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Grant.
I mean, it’s funny that you talked earlier about having a long arc of a career and I was like, “Oh yeah, I do have like 18 years of working on some of this stuff. I guess I’m like a mid-career scholar now. After 18 years of applying for fellowships and grants. I’m now I’m getting them and I’m like, “Oh my god, this is so amazing. I feel so lucky.”
Cathy [05:26]: So much of your work—both the projects that you’re describing here, which I want to come back to in a minute, but also the other work that you’ve done across the course of your career—seems really at home in this intersection between creative art or visual art performance combined with activism and academia and I’m curious what you find so fruitful about that intersection.
Shaka [05:52]: I discovered Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s writing at the very end of my time as an undergraduate and what she was doing blew me away. It was the model I had been looking for for my own work. I was really lucky to encounter work like that, work like Crack Wars or The Telephone Book, people who were experimenting with form. And then in graduate school I worked with Katie Stewart and that was also amazing. I also had the chance to work with Sandy Stone, and so I had models to work with in those days.
[06:45] I think it’s not even that I find the approach fruitful—though I do—but that it is almost impossible for me to write some other way. There are a few essays that I have out that are more traditional, that don’t incorporate so much of the personal, like book reviews. This paper I wrote on what we were calling copropower, a piece about shit basically. But most of my writing is what comes out. And then it’s just revised sort of to death.
At this point, I, I’ve struggled with this in a way that I don’t always want to write the sort of [inaudible] and I almost find that I can’t do it. And so in a way, it’s a disruptive practice within the academy and maybe also an activist practice in its own way. I think about people like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons. When I first started reading that book, it bent my brain in new ways and again provided another sort of model for working and writing from some perspective that was within but also lateral to the academy.
Cathy [07:46]: So I’d love to talk a little bit more about those books that you mentioned—the one on drag and the one on Black data. What are those projects all about?
Shaka [07:55]: So The Political Aesthetics of Drag began in a kind of on-and-off-again gay bar in Jerusalem. My former partner and I were at this bar, this tiny, tiny space, and it was completely packed with tourists, with Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jews. For this mixed race anthropologist, it was a very kind of interesting space in a city that has a really funky and intense history. We were watching a drag show and the drag show was really familiar. You had drag queens performing lip syncs largely in English. But there was a moment where one of the drag queens, Diva D, began to connect to the audience directly and asked, “who are the tourists in the room?”
[08:50] I didn’t raise my hand, I wasn’t brave enough, but this young German woman toward the stage was braver. And so she raised her hand and Diva D, asked, “where are you from?” The woman young woman answered, “I’m from Germany.” And then Diva D did this really funny thing. She did a little goose step and it kind of heil gesture and then she just sort of softened and said, “don’t worry honey, we’re doing the same thing now too.” And then she just went onto the rest of her drag show. So I was struck by this moment in which she completely upset our expectations of what an Israeli is expected and even permitted to say in the contemporary political climate of Israel.
[09:48] And so that was part of the birth of that project, this way that drag could work not only with gender and thinking about the performance activity of gender, but could make interventions in politics that were enabled precisely because of the liminal position of people who perform in drag. The other part of it, of course, was like binge watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. When I discovered that show, I’d never seen something like that. And I love the celebration of people who are never made visible in mass media, namely femme men and drag queens. So that’s how The Political Aesthetics of Drag project began. And I knew right away that I wanted to work with artists and activists who use drag. So it wasn’t going to be a comprehensive revisiting of all of the conversations about drag. It was going to be something a little bit more like Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. The original concept was to work in Israel, Palestine, Berlin, and New York City, but as my relationship with my former partner began to fall apart, the momentum of the project began to stall.
[11:00] So I had to really rethink the project and it’s only been really recently and as a result of my students who encouraged me to continue the book. I’d really thought it was completely failed at this point and I’d never done the New York fieldwork. But they said, “no, you and your former partner are already characters in the book. What if you told the story of the failure of the book, of the project, and the failure of the relationship at the same time?” And the light bulb went off. I thought, “yeah, that’s a great idea!” And one that I wouldn’t have been able to come to without my students who chided me for being too attached to the form when when I was always telling them not to get too attached to form. All right. That’s a very long-winded explanation of the book.
[11:45] The Black Data project also has that kind of circuitous journey. I think it works. Okay. If you ask an academic, they’re going to talk for like 20 minutes about something. I could just say like the book is about activists and artists who use drag—that’s the one sentence that’s the elevator pitch.
The elevator pitch for Black Data would be something like: artists who are working from a feminist or queer perspective who are responding to changes in art and technology through their own work and especially focusing on things like surveillance, biometrics, and algorithmic discrimination, who are responding to these technologically-enabled transformations tied to biopolitics.
The book is in a way even more experimental. I’m hoping to work collaboratively with some of the artists. I imagine the book is somewhere between a academic monograph, sort of a sketch of what these emergent media and these emergent technologies of surveillance are doing, and an art book—something that has a kind of aesthetic quality just as an object. In both of these projects, art practices have become really central to both of them and is reflected in my desire to move back to a visual arts practice.
Cathy [13:09]: Obviously these are separate projects. They’re two different books that you’re putting together, but it seems like all of your work in these projects is kind of exemplary of this, demonstrating that these questions of technology, of networks, of data are fundamentally intertwined with these questions of art and performance. That’s not a combination that a lot of people make and I think it’s really smart and it’s really intriguing. How does that work? Why is performance inherently intertwined with technology and vice versa?
Shaka [13:43]: I mean, as an anthropologist I was trained to just pay attention to how people are using things. Coming to intellectual age at the end of the ‘90s, all of those conversations that emerged from British cultural and media studies are still, I’m still working with them. I’m still working with identity, with performance, with their intersection in political spheres. I’m also just interested in the very basic materiality of how people are using these objects and interacting with one another as a result. Another way to think about it is various performance practices that I’m interested in, like drag, these are inherently performances and they are touching broader publics. So the performance isn’t something that is isolated. That’s the whole idea. It’s something that moves out more broadly into the world, that has ripples.
Maybe a concrete example would be useful. So I’ve been really interested in voguing over the last year or so. Marlon Bailey wrote this amazing book Butch Queens Up in Pumps about the ball scene in Detroit. So I’m coming to this kind of late and lots of people like Marlon came before me. One of the things I’ve been really interested in with voguing is how this expressive form that really emerges from Black and Latinx queer communities is now exploding around the world. Some of that is happening through media platforms like YouTube.
This intersection between an ordinary performance practice and media has always been part of what I’m working on. So one of the main themes of the Black Data project is this sorta pulsation between opacity and transparency. Anything about redaction. Or you can think about the invisible operations of algorithms and how they can shape people’s lives.
[15:54] So voguing is a case that I’m thinking about in similar ways. On the one hand, voguing is achieving a new level of visibility through the activities of the people who practice voguing. They’re people who are part of ballroom scenes and at the same time there is something opaque, something that is not transparent about it. To really gain access, you have to become a member. And since Madonna’s “Vogue” and Paris Is Burning and other people who’ve been looking at voguing as an object of inquiry, the ballroom scene has become, I think, more protective. They want to maintain a degree of ownership, a kind of ownership that hasn’t already always been there, even as they want to spread voguing to every corner of the world.
Cathy [16:40]: So you and I have known each other quite awhile at this point, like 12 years or something like that.
Shaka: Yeah.
Cathy: We, we met for the first time at a queer studies conference (go figure) back in 2005 in Asheville, North Carolina. And you gave an incredibly beautiful presentation that to this day, when I read it, it makes me cry. It’s called “Desire and Ethnographic Research” and in it you were talking about what happens when we study the things that we love—that kind of desire that’s baked into ethnographic research and how that desire changes and morphs over the course of inquiry. You were talking about your dissertation project, but this seems to be a theme that has come across in your books since then as well. You pointed out that if you study the things that you love, you are probably also going to study losing them as well. I love that phrasing; it’s incredibly evocative. I would really love to talk more about that intertwining of desire and loss and how it shapes your work.
Shaka [17:50]: Yeah, I mean, you know, when I was working on the dissertation, it was really obvious. I was trying on some level to write a celebratory account of histories of public sex in Austin [Texas] and all of the ways that new technologies were providing new affordances for people to connect for love and sex. But of course, the longer I studied this, the more I realized that these histories were profoundly impacted by HIV/AIDS. People that I worked with were really suffering, still suffering a decade or two decades later, from the traumatic losses that they experienced as a result of HIV/AIDS. So the closer I came into contact with that, the more intense it was. I had to work through that intellectually, but there was no way for me not to work through it personally as well.
[18:44] My Virtual Intimacies book works likewise,. I document some of those histories again, but also just the ways that there is never desire without loss. This is shaped, I think, by my spiritual practice, which is also something I’ve begun talking more about in my writing. In many of the Eastern traditions—Buddhism, Tantra—it’s not just that attachment leads to suffering. It’s actually not about not being attached. It’s just understanding that attachment is always going to come with a feeling of either something not being enough or the transformations that attend our attachments. So at the beginning and end of a relationship, for example, not unlike the ways that I’m writing now. I’m not sure there’s a way for me not to do the work in this way.
[19:50] I’ve always found it fascinating and also a little incomprehensible how some people will work with amazing topics and write beautiful books that are really representative of an intellectual passion or interest but that don’t really address how they came to that work or what their personal investments are in it. A lot of my work has also been a working through of my own histories, my own experiences with trauma—a public working through my own losses. It was feminist and queer writers who provided a foundation for me to work in these ways: Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandy Stone in her own way. There are so many examples within anthropology. People like Esther Newton—she’s one of the first openly gay anthropologists to do work on gay issues.
People talk about love in the field, the ways that we form erotic and emotional attachments with the people that we study. It animates so much of our continued work on a topic or even how sometimes we arrived to a fieldsite. There are so many anthropologists who talk about how as an undergraduate they went to X country and they fell in love with someone and that their return, even if the relationship didn’t work, was part of the impetus for their topic.
[12:10] Their topic could have been, you know, water use in Mongolia, but what brought them there was something more intimate. I don’t think everyone needs to do this kind of writing, but I hope that some of my own work, like the work that came before me by all of these amazing feminist and queer writers, does give people some permission to do that. And I think that what we’re working against in doing this kind of work, Esther Newton describes it when she was doing her fieldwork as well. There is still a kind of skepticism about writing in a personal voice. There’s so much debate, which I don’t understand, about things like autoethnography. There are really sometimes snarky attitudes toward memoir in this post-identity moment. The idea is that we’re not sovereign subjects and there’s sometimes a resulting notion (that I don’t think is necessarily true) that because we’re non-sovereign subjects, biography doesn’t matter or memoir is like a bad form or an inappropriate form. And I just don’t agree with that.
[22:21] I think you can absolutely do intellectual work through the personal and there is no personal work without working through not just the heart but the mind as well.
Cathy [22:31]: Do you have any advice for writers who want to do more of this kind of work, this intertwining of the intellectual, the personal, and the political, but maybe don’t know how or are scared because it makes you vulnerable?
Shaka [22:46]: Yeah, it does. You know, I wrote a really a piece that I’m really proud of, but for all kinds of reasons I’m publishing it anonymously. A lot of that has to do with the cultural climate that we’re living in and it sort of goes further than anything I’ve written about intimacy and desire. It’s about pedagogy. It’s about spirituality. Any of your listeners can email me and I’ll send it to them, but my name won’t be attached to publicly to it.
I think that people just have to do it. There are so many models out there. I think people should write the way they want to. I think people should be reading really widely outside of academic writing, which is so highly specialized. However inspiring it is in terms of thinking, it’s not really accessible to most, say, undergraduates.
[23:34] I think it is important, that it is possible, to write both in a rigorous way—in a way that attends to the issues that we care about as scholars—but also to write in ways that can reach an audience. Working with the intimate is one way to do that, but I think my advice would be, whatever you are, younger scholars, you might have to be strategic as you’re looking for work about how much you want to share because of the hostility toward biographical writing that you might find in some places. But do that other writing in other contexts—a blog, other kinds of public engagements. I mean most people are. This is sort of sad, but people on a search committee are not necessarily going to read the thing that you published in the Huffington Post. They’re going to read your academic work.
[24:19] I was really lucky and part of that is probably about certain forms of male privilege, despite my moving toward a more genderqueer identity. I still inherit all of these forms of male privilege. I gave a job talk about public sex and gave people in the audience, including a dean, material to read from my project. And I got this job, so I think I’ve been super lucky. People in different subject positions are going to have different experiences with that, but I really think it’s important to write what you want to write and to write in ways that enable people to work through something, to work through things that are both shaped by our intellectual concerns but also by our desires.
Cathy [25:11]: So this brings me to my absolute favorite question that I get to ask guests, which is why I leave it to the end. Obviously this podcast is called Imagine Otherwise and you and the other guests that I feel privileged to be able to interview are doing just that: imagining and creating otherwise. And so my question is, what kind of world are you working towards when you’re doing performances, when you step in front of a classroom, when you do this kind of creative writing, when you think about the kind of desire that’s baked into ethnography? What’s the world you’re working towards? What kind of world do you want?
Shaka [25:47]: This is gonna sound so cheesy, but when I sit down to practice meditation, my intention is of two parts (and some people have said it’s actually the same thing): freedom and love. I love—however excruciating it can be—I love the practice of writing. I want to connect with the people that I am writing for. I do feel that I am writing as much for other people as I am writing for myself and working through. It’s more almost a service, of seva.
I’ll give an example that addresses the question from the side. So I’m teaching a class this semester called New Black Ethnography and in the past, I’ve given students a range of work some which is not so new, like Zora Neale Hurston and WEB DuBois, and then they’ve done ethnographic projects that were amazing and brilliant about schooling and Black hair and Black businesses.
[26:40] But this year I took a different tack. I had them to create Afrofuturist ethnographies, speculative ethnographies in which they were writing and studying a topic as anthropologists from the future. They could either conduct this ethnographic project in that future world in which they lived or through a time-traveling process where they come back. Each of them created their own project. So each of them imagined a different kind of world. Some of these worlds are really dystopian, some of them are post-peak oil. The world is flooded, but something interesting is happening. And I’ve been so inspired by their projects.
[27:30] One of the young women in the class is writing about the hydronoir. The hydronoir are these Afro-descended hybrids who are the descendants of slaves who were thrown overboard during the Middle Passage and who somehow survived and develop these symbiotic relationships with creatures from the sea. And in this future, they finally kind of come out and returned and they return to this flooded New York and are working with QTPOC activists groups. This is imagining a world.
Another student is doing fieldwork on this floating island of Afro-descended people that was made possible by funding provided by the first Black female President Michelle Obama, and this floating city is moving around. It’s a site for creatives.
Some of the students are studying fashion and these wearable clothes and things that are attuned to the world around them. Someone is working on holoffiti, the resistant practices of creating holographic graffiti. So whatever I imagine the world to be, I am so inspired by the work of students like this who helped me imagine otherwise.
Cathy: Well thank you so much for being with us and sharing your version of imagining. Otherwise.
Shaka: It’s my pleasure.
Cathy [28:52]: [upbeat music in background] Thanks for listening to another episode of Imagine Otherwise. Imagine Otherwise is produced by Ideas on Fire and this episode was created by Christopher Persaud, Rebecca Reynolds, Michelle Velasquez-Potts, and myself, Cathy Hannabach.
You can check out the show notes for this episode on our website at ideasonfire.net where you can also read about our fabulous guest as well as find links to the people and projects we discuss on the show. [music fadeout]
