Meet the Team: Dr. Alexandre White
Dr. White is Co-PI of Black Beyond Data, head of the Risk and Racism Project and co-founder of the Underwriting Souls project.
In January 2024, we launched a new monthly series introducing followers to some of our members. This month, we are featuring Dr. Alexandre (Sasha) White.
Who are you and what do you do with LifexCode?
Hi, I’m Alexandre White (though I generally go by Sasha for short). I’m part of LifxCode and direct the Risk and Racism component of Black Beyond Data. I’m also a co-PI on Black Beyond Data and alongside Pyar Seth, make up the team of Underwritingsouls.org.
Tell us about your lab or project and why it is digital humanities against enclosure.
Risk and Racism aims to critically investigate how forms of knowledge, in our case medical and financial knowledges, have reconstituted Black life in various ways. Our team includes Pyar Seth, Jessica Hester and Durgesh Solanki, all grad students working on various projects pertaining to health and the erasures and recoveries of humanity. Underwriting Souls is an interactive archive and set of online exhibitions that examine the role of insurance in the trans-Atlantic slave trade drawn from the Archives of Lloyd’s in London.
What is one piece of media (text, art, music, really anything) that inspires your work?
That’s a really tough question. While Pyar and I were working on Underwriting Souls we took a lot of creative inspiration from the art of William Kentridge and this exhibit in particular. I’m also so constantly inspired with poets and visual artists we have been able to work with as part of underwriting souls in the production of the volume Uprising and Resistance. This piece blows me away. I guess that’s two but I hope you won’t begrudge me.
What DH tools, methods, or theories do you recommend for folks exploring digital humanities against enclosure?
Through Underwriting Souls we were very focused on confronting the ethical challenges of our research on slavery and the insurance of the Atlantic slave trade. We thought a lot about how to represent violence, especially when it is abstracted through financial systems and how to consider the presence of the enslaved even in seemingly distant insurance practices in Britain. We drew a lot on the folks closest to us. Jessica Marie Johnson’s “Markup Bodies” was a huge inspiration as well as Kim Gallon’s “Making the Case for Black Digital Humanities.” We were also deeply informed by museum studies practices and protocols like the CARE principles and have been engaging more, especially as we think about future projects and collaborating with descendant communities. We used Montpelier’s Rubric on Descendant Community engagement and teaching slavery. StoryMaps was also an incredibly important vehicle for resisting the narrative put forward by archives of slavers. From StoryMaps we produced 9 exhibitions on Underwriting Souls.
What do you like to do in your free time or how do you recharge? We prioritize rest as part of our decolonial praxis.
I’m probably a bad role model and I never suggest that people follow my example. I love gardening at my house. I keep several orchids in my office and also try to take care of several rose bushes at home. I’m excited about how far my climbing rose will get on our front porch this year. Last year we built a gym in our basement by ourselves and that has been hugely important for my mental health and lifting my spirits after a long day. As most people will probably know here, working on histories of slavery requires in so many ways a different affective approach to so much other work and the practice of writing these histories is both fraught and emotionally devastating. We need to take breaks and time for ourselves. I don’t do it enough but I would encourage everyone to do so.
Check out Dr. White’s JHU profile.