<aside> ✨ #interactive web #live performance #sound-studies #music #DC #covid-19
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Narratives of Black life during the Covid-19 pandemic have disproportionately focused on high death rates, increased comorbidities, vaccine hesitancy, limited vaccine availability, and how racism has exacerbated Black suffering throughout the pandemic. But what of those stories of care, community, and how Black people have kept each other well during the pandemic? What do those stories sound like?
Black Covid Care is an attempt to listen to this care, to the ways in which Black people have supported each other during the pandemic. It is a way to listen to the depth, intricacy, and interconnectedness of Black care not only through Covid but through deeper lineages as well. Black Covid Care is a digital website project with Black sound studies at its core, recognizing that sound is crucial to Black epistemologies. The website is set with a backdrop of stars in the galaxy, and users will be able to build interactive sonic “constellations,” reading about individual stories as well as interconnected lineages of care.
Black Covid Care is the first project of the Black Sound Lab, a research environment at Dartmouth College dedicated to amplifying Black life and decriminalizing Black sound through digital practice. Each star and constellation features sound from Boomscat, a Black queer band from Washington, DC that has created ethereal soundscapes to accompany the stories of care. In its current state, the project is a partially complete website: we have a functioning back end that allows for star and constellation creation. Funds and consultation support from the AADHum Scholars Program would be used to work on the front end, launching the website, and community engagement.
In creating a galaxy of care, this project does not argue that the pandemic has not been utterly devastating to Black communities, because it has. And yet, Black Covid Care asks that we hold devastation and care simultaneously. This amplification of care lineages offers a map, a digital resource, a galaxy that can spark inspiration and intention in knowing that Black people have moved in community care for centuries.
<aside> 🧭 twitter @alliejrmartin
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Allie Martin is an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College in the Music Department and the Cluster for Digital Humanities and Social Engagement. Her work explores the relationships between race, sound, and gentrification in Washington, DC. Utilizing a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and digital humanities methodologies, Allie considers how African-American people in the city experience gentrification as a sonic, racialized process. Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Society for American Music, and the American Musicological Society. She is currently working on her first book, entitled Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC.
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