Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Pyar Seth
Dr. Seth, founder of HipHipRx, tells us why "feeling good" is part of health equity, and about his research that prompted the leading insurance market in the UK to promise reparations.
Introduce yourself. Are you a student, postdoc, faculty? With what institution? What do you do with LifexCode?
My name is Dr. Pyar Seth and I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Incoming Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame. I’m the Project Director of HipHopRx, a new lab with LifexCode.
How long have you been involved with LifexCode? What inspired you to join?
I have been affiliated with LxC since the fall of 2021, so my second year of graduate school. I was introduced to LxC through the Black World Seminar [BWS]. The year I participated [in the BWS], Drs. Johnson and Jones were leading it, so there were a lot of LxC members attending it. They exposed me to all the really cool, creative academic work that was being done - I saw that there was room for creativity in academia. That was also the first year that Black Beyond Data got started, so I was part of that start up. I started working with Risk and Racism, Underwriting Souls, and a little bit with Racism in Medicine.
What inspired me? Surely, Dr. Johnson, Dr. Jones, and the Black faculty that led the BWS. But it was really the graduate students like Christina Thomas, Kelsey Moore, Halle Ashby and other junior scholars that inspired me after seeing them workshop their ideas. I wanted to do some of the cool stuff that those folk were doing. I also have to give a shout out to my homegirl, Sarah Bruno. I don’t think I’ve ever actually said this to her directly (and I definitely should have by now) but she has been someone that really helped me figure out the type of scholar I wanted to be. I actually knew Sarah before I came to graduate school and so, when she would tell me about some of the stuff she was working on, I was always like, “Wow, that’s so dope! Maybe I could do something like that one day.” She is just a really really dope, creative scholar and I’ve always admired that about her. It was also really cool to find out that she was a part of LifexCode, to see just how big the LifexCode network actually is, and to see that so many of us gravitated toward this space because it was one of the few academic spaces where we could channel our creativity.
Tell me about your lab or project.
When I first joined LifexCode, I was primarily working with Underwriting Souls, which was a digital humanities project led by Dr. Sasha White, digitizing and contextualizing the Lloyd’s archive and their documents related to slavery and the slave trade. A lot of people ask me how I got looped into insurance when I work primarily on health and medicine. It was interesting for me to see so many connections, like seeing how attributions of Black life are increasingly measured in speculative terms. In my own work, I look at autopsies, inquests, and toxicology reports, and I could see how autopsies were used to evaluate Black life. Slave traders would manipulate autopsies to receive their payouts. I saw continuities around the logics that work to produce distortions of Black life and death across archives. Underwriting Souls ended up co-informing and co-producing the work I did in my dissertation, even though they were two seemingly “separate” projects.
Can you explain more about how autopsies were used in insurance?
Daina Ramey Berry actually writes a lot about this. Autopsies were some of the core documents that insurers would use to chip away at Black bodies and declare them “fit” or “biologically inferior” (for example). They were crucial to thinking about the human body, and from there insurers would map on financial logics. Insurers were using autopsies to explain or justify the prices they imposed on enslaved people - for example, ‘Negroes’ of a certain stature were said to live this long, so they’d be priced accordingly.” And with insurance, losses were recoverable in death, so slaveholders wanted insurance to ensure they could get their money back in case an enslaved person died.
A lot of my work thinks about biological reductionism - in a modern context, there will be notes on a Black person’s autopsy that blames their death on heart disease rather than a knee to a neck. Like with George Floyd - his death was blamed on heart disease or hypertension, not Derek Chauvin suffocating him.
What is something you have done with LifexCode that you are especially proud of, were inspired by, or generally considered a great experience?
I’m really, really happy with the way the Digital Exhibit for the Underwriting Souls Project turned out. We digitized all of the documents in the Lloyd’s archive and placed that material under a Creative Commons License. I’m really happy that researchers and the public can work with these documents as much as they choose. I think there is a real public yearning to know about the history of slavery, and this project shows how insurance was a backbone in the slave trade - slave traders wouldn’t risk incurring significant losses without insurance. It all goes back to slavery! And this project goes beyond that conceptual one-liner and fleshes out those connections for a public audience. And I’m proud that our research prompted a response from Lloyd’s about reparations. There will never be enough to allot, but to prompt the world’s largest insurance market to respond, I’m kinda proud of that.
What was the archive like?
I’m not entirely sure Lloyd’s knew what they had. After the 2020 protests, Lloyd's realized they needed someone to make sense of their historical records - that's when they brought in Victoria Lane as their archivist. I had the pleasure of working alongside Victoria and Sasha, and together we really had to roll up our sleeves to piece together what we were actually looking at. I don’t think they - really anybody - truly understood how deep their connections to slavery were and how many actors from Lloyd’s were involved in insuring the slave trade. I definitely felt, for lack of a better term or phrase, an air of curiosity, about what we might find. Institutions across the board, across the globe, are being asked about their histories. And these histories really get people talking, especially in Britain these days. Our experience in the Lloyd's archives was just one piece of a much larger cultural moment where Britain is really starting to dig deep into its imperial past, trying to grasp just how far-reaching and powerful the impact of empire truly was and continues to be.
The other complicated piece is, again, that Lloyd’s doesn’t really have an archive because it’s not a company, it’s a market. Lloyd’s does have some materials related to the market, but a lot of the knowledge about Lloyd’s and its past is likely concentrated among the specific actors and the records from their individual syndicates. Some of the materials tied to the market that we digitized were risk books, full-length insurance agreements, and a few other documents from auctions and the like. We need to visit a whole host of other archives, like the London Metropolitan Archives and the British National Archives at Kew, to further contextualize the market-specific materials they had. From there, we tried to find as much information about the crucial actors involved as possible. So I guess the Lloyd’s archive is both large and small at the same time.
What is your vision for HipHopRx?
I do a lot of work on health and medicine, and I’m hoping it can be a space for us to think about health justice - what does it look like, feel like, and sound like? I think when we talk about health equity, we mean more than just access to healthcare and reducing mortality rates. I think people also want to feel good. I’m hoping HipHopRx can be a space to think about what it means to feel good. I’m also hoping it can be a space for more interesting research about hip hop. I think a lot of research on hip hop focuses on lyrical analysis, which can be productive, but there are a lot of really cool digital collections on hip hop that are largely untouched. I’m hoping HipHopRx can be a space for faculty and students to engage in these digital archives and think about wider digitization efforts on hip hop. I think hip hop has more to offer than just rap lyrics, from hip hop artists who are organizers that really understand their communities, to hip hop as a form of narrative medicine.
What do you see as the connection between hip hop and health?
I don’t know yet! But I do know that health equity requires us to be more creative in terms of our approaches. Channeling our ethnographic sensibilities - all of us have moments where we feel whole. When we have a bad day, we might listen to music or put on our favorite playlist. I think being in tune with those little moments can help us feel whole as a people. When I have a bad day, I listen to my favorite artists and that might not make all the pain all go away, but I do feel a little better. Music plays an integral role in terms of making our days feel lighter. This idea of ‘feeling good,’ you know?
What is one piece of media (text, art, music, really anything) that inspires your work, or that you just love and want to share?
Hip hop has always been the beginning of the research process for me. Almost all of my published work starts with a hip hop verse. I open one of my chapters in my dissertation - now book! - with a line from Biggie: “And what they don’t know will show on the autopsy.” Artists like Bigger put words to really complicated ideas that I struggled to find words for, but Biggie summed up my whole book in a few lines! So, yeah, I got a lot of love for Biggie. I’m also a huge Black Thought fan, huge Nas fan, huge fan of Queen Latifah, and huge fan of Missy Elliot too.
Two of my all-time favorite albums though are “Care for Me” by Saba and “Everything’s for Sale” by WESTSIDE BOOGIE. A lot of those tracks talk about being, feeling, and knowing. There’s a lot to unpack with those albums! They deal with all of the existential questions that people face as they encounter violent power structures. So those two albums have helped jumpstart my thinking too.
I am also a huge comic book person. I love them because they have always been a space for me to think about abolition. I hope to one day teach a course on comic books and abolition. If you think about Spider-man, he has a pretty fraught relationship with the police. I’ve heard people say that it’s hard for them to wrap their minds around abolition, but at the center of comic books is the idea that the “state” or the “government” or the police are failing us, and the people need superheroes - people from the neighborhood! Justice has never been found in the government or policing, but it’s found in people - superhumans and web-slingers or just kids who are motivated to think about their communities. There are so many themes about abolition and justice that I really appreciate in comic books.
Did you make those connections as a kid or did you start to see them as you got older?
The abolition piece came later, like by the time I got to college, but even as a kid I was always intrigued by the shortcomings of society. It was interesting to see villains - they oftentimes saw a problem with society and wanted to fix it, but they became too power-hungry. It’s a very western, kind of imperialistic notion when you think about it, you know? Look at Thanos - he’s kind of talking about the redistribution of wealth, but the problem is he gets to decide who lives and who dies. When I thought about Gotham [as a kid], I was seeing things that were happening in my own community, so I think I picked up on some very real threads as a child. I think my love of imaginary worlds connects to why I was attracted to LifexCode, which is very much about ‘imagining an otherwise.’ I was fascinated with justice as a kid, and I developed a particular orientation toward wanting to understand it in all its forms.
What digital humanities tools, methods, or theories do you recommend for folks exploring DH against enclosure?
Dr. Johnson and Dr. Kim Gallon were and have been lightyears ahead of the field - if you’re not taking up their work, you need to! We need more folk thinking about these “technologies of recovery,” in Dr. Gallon’s words. Other people I admire are Dr. Sarah Bruno and Dr. Kemi Adeyemi, who founded the Black Embodiments Studio.
I think what I appreciate about all of these folk is how they think about archives. Our bodies can be archives. The things we write down in our notebooks can count as archives. They helped me develop a capacious understanding of knowledge production. I like reading things about the archival turn in history and anthropology alongside DH literature to get a sense of how folk develop their understandings of the world around us. The people I named are all people with really great - and complex - conceptualizations of the archive.
What do you like to do in your free time or how do you recharge? We like to prioritize rest as part of our decolonial praxis.
I came to grad school and thought I was going to write a dissertation about rest, trying to unpack the question, “Given the pervasiveness of anti-Black violence, for Black folk, what does it mean to rest?” I think I came to that question because I was trying to develop an answer for myself, but I pivoted because the scope was just too big. But I’m still trying to figure it out! I’ve grown more comfortable with the idea that balance might not always take shape in an even, 50/50 split. When does my enjoyment of reading, writing, and thinking spill over into not being able to turn my brain off? But I’ve become more comfortable with the fact that reading books is something I do for a living, and that I also find comfort in it. Equilibrium has been my word. Even if listening to hip-hop or looking at comic books can get me thinking, it reminds me that I really do love what I do. That brings me peace and helps me reach equilibrium. I do sleep well at night knowing that I enjoy what I do.
But practically speaking, I love basketball, and I love watching movies. I was a Film Studies major in undergrad because I loved admiring beautiful shots and storylines and character arcs. As I’ve said a bunch now, I also love hip-hop. I see the way that people talk about hip-hop and its history, especially the ways that people talked about it when it first popped onto the music scene, like, “What are these Black kids doing?” It produced so different notions and renderings of Black insanity. I see all the different ways that people continue to link Blackness, hip-hop, and criminality. It reminds me of how so many continue to police Black creativity, and that’s why I love it and double down on it. Can’t nobody stop us from saying what we want to say, and doing what we want to do!
Is there anything I didn’t ask about that you want to share?
Creativity is one of my core values. I think academia needs more creativity, and we need more spaces that allow us to channel our creativity in our everyday lives. I want to live in a world where people can express themselves fully. The world doesn’t work without creativity.
This interview was conducted and edited for space and clarity by Dr. Brooke Lansing Mai.