Fall 2023 Lab Notes from the Director
Two years later we are SURFACING......
Two years have passed since the last set of lab notes. I hope the time has fared you well. I know it did us good. In the words of the inestimable Beyonce Knowles Carter, we are getting “comfortable in her skin, cozy, cozy.”
Forgive me. Like the rest of the DC/MD/VA area yesterday, I spent last night experiencing a renaissance and I am still high on glitter, sparkle, and the power of radical possibilities that Black culture, Black feminism, kinship, community, and pleasure bring.
But this is our baseline at LxC. When Christina Thomas and I founded LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure, we wanted the principles to be transparent, timeless, and true to what is needed to decolonize, protect, inspire, and transform Black diasporic lives. It was her suggestion to build on the work of Dr. Tina Campt, on the keywords Campt offered in her “invitation” to be in the loophole of retreat. Since then, Christina Thomas is now Dr. Thomas, and has moved on to doing this work in practice in the South (learn more about her and her current work here). Since then, we have worked through three of the five keywords: insurgency (2020-2021), vessel (2021-2022), and touch (2022-2023). Now I’d like to offer the next keyword to guide our work: SURFACE.
surface:
the outside part or uppermost layer of something
(often used when describing its texture, form, or extent);
to rise or come up to the surface of the water or the ground.
The last two years have been full (vessel) and intimate (touch). LifexCode onboarded and launched multiple labs and projects, thanks to generous funding from the National Historic Publications & Records Commission, the Mellon Foundation, the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, and our university partners at JHU Sheridan Libraries, Brown University and Michigan State University. We’ve remained committed to our transformative, responsive, and in relation community engagement with partnerships in Baltimore (St. Francis Neighborhood Center, New Generation Scholars, African Diaspora Alliance), New Orleans (The Black School, Louisiana Museum of African American History), Puerto Rico (Yagrumo), London (Ink, Sweat & Tears and the Runaways), and begun building friendly camaraderie and future hopes with others (AFROCharities curation of the Taller Electric Marronage installation at the New Generation Scholars TAKE + MAINTAIN exhibit for example).
In the weeks ahead, we will be posting recaps, photos, video, and reflections from a host of events that have occurred, as well as catch up to ones to come. We didn’t do much of that the last two years. I’d like to blame the changing social media landscape for that, but the truth is, we’ve been past capacity! As vessels, we were full! As physical beings, we were tuned into the present, the embodied, the in person joys of reopening and recalibrating in a post?-COVID world. But we were DOING the digital, we weren’t announcing our doings.
And by “past capacity,” of course, I don’t mean we. I mean me, an academic mama of two dynamic toddlers! The last two years have coincided with some of the most tumultuous years of the parenting journey—at least until the teenage years. So our/my vessel was full and we/I was touched out. Thank you to all who stepped in, supported projects, entered into leadership roles, or just offered grace, patience, and empathy as we all navigated lab research, teaching and programming loads. My fellow directors and project managers have blown me away with their generosity and strength. And a special, warm, effusive thank you to the researchers themselves, the LxC members, without whom this whole experiment falls apart. Y’all are the TRUTH, truly.
Over the last six months or so, things have begun to smooth out and the power of this work is slowly rising to the SURFACE. Touch is nothing without texture, so it makes sense to enter a new year considering what we have brought to the fore, what shape the work is beginning to take, how it feels, and what we want it to look like.
Thankfully, with support from JHU’s Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, LifexCode enters this new year of work with the support of two amazing individuals.
Dr. Nadejda Webb will be joining LifexCode: DH Against Enclosure as our new (and first!) Assistant Director!
Nadejda I. Webb (she/her/they) is currently an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow in Black Digital Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, where her teaching and research interests include 20th and 21st-century African-American and Post-Colonial literature and digital humanities, imaginaries, and belonging. In 2024, she will be the incoming Assistant Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Center for Digital Humanities.
In her first year at JHU, she initiated the “We Live Language” (WLL) lab in Black Beyond Data, a Computational Humanities and Social Sciences ecosystem, and co-organized the 2023 Keystone DH conference. WLL is grounded in the writing and spoken word of Afro-diasporic poets, authors, and philosophers and probes the relationship between language and power. In addition to WLL, she is revising her book manuscript, Reckoning: Visual Narratives and Truth-Making, which examines the relationship between new media platforms, self-making, and anti-black racial fictions.
She complements her academic research interests with deep community investments. In addition to working with New Generation Scholars and African Diaspora Alliance, two Baltimore-area community programs while at JHU, she has created curricula for and taught in the CUNY Pipeline Program, which supports Black and Brown undergraduate CUNY students in both getting into and thriving ingratiate school. She is an incoming 2023-24 Center for Social Concern’s Engaged Scholar Faculty Fellow, which supports her in co-teaching an undergraduate course with a Baltimore community partner.
Webb’s research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, Columbia University’s Center for Oral History, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and Vanderbilt University. She received her joint-Ph.D. in English and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice from Vanderbilt and her BA in English Language and Literature from CUNY Hunter College.
Webb is finishing an ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship this year and will join us full time in July 2024!
Dr. Brooke Lansing will also be rejoining LifexCode: DH Against Enclosure as our new Project Manager!
Dr. Brooke Lansing earned her PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University in 2023. Her doctoral research focused on women’s experiences with abortion and the emergence of antiabortion activism in nineteenth-century New York City. She has received several awards for her work, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ Fellowship in the History of American Obstetrics and Gynecology. Dr. Lansing has contributed to amicus briefs for both federal- and state-level court cases over abortion legislation. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked at Oxford University Development North America and earned her BA from Princeton University.
Brooke was the Logistics Manager from Fall 2021, but took a break to finish her dissertation. Dr. Lansing, we missed you and it is good to have you back!!!!
SURFACE: THE KEYWORD FOR 2023-2024
The work happening across this archipelago (or constellation!) of labs, communities, partnerships, and kinships is beyond my wildest dreams. I am grateful, always, to be part of this community, to support scholars who are interested in their digital humanities engagement being baseline antiracist and decolonial, and being in community beyond the academy and in intentional and transformative ways. The work hasn’t been easy. It has been uncomfortable and intense, exciting and powerful. We are barely scratching the SURFACE of the potential among us, within us, and beyond us. We will keep on keeping on!
Although social media is exploding, do follow us on Twitter & IG (@life_x_code), here on substack and on our website for updates. And you can find me more often on IG than Twitter these days @jmjafrx_ (don’t forget the underscore).
While we aren’t quite in the FORMATION keyword yet, if you’d like to preview some my formative thinking on what it means to do the digital humanities “against enclosure,” inspired by the labs and projects of the last three years, see these preliminary thoughts at the 2023 Louisiana Digital Library Festival. Thank you Leah Duncan for inviting me out and shout out to Dr. Eva Baham (Dillard University) and Ms. Kathe Hambrick (Founder, River Road African American Museum), both active Keywords with Keywords for Black Louisiana, and Ms. Angela Proctor, archivist at Southern University in Baton Rouge, who I got to see and spend quality time with. GRATEFUL!
Again, this is still just the beginning. We are only just getting in formation—but we are happy to be here.
All the best,
Jessica Marie Johnson, Assoc Prof of History, Dir. of lifexcode.org