Join us on Wednesday, October 23rd from 2-3 pm in 1102 Woods Hall for a paper presentation by Dr. Marlaina Martin.
PAPER TITLE: “’It is Only by Finding Solace’: Analyzing Vulnerability, Voice, and Validation in Black Women’s Independent Media Production”
PAPER ABSTRACT: Dr. Martin’s paper “’It is Only By Finding Solace’: Analyzing Vulnerability, Voice, and Validation in Black Women’s Independent Media Production” investigates how Black women utilize media production processes as means to actively cope with, contemplate, and (re)construct pathways of imagining Black futures in a society whose blindness to intersectional realities (i.e. social, cultural, economic, political, and so on) potentiates serious – in many cases, literally life-or-death – consequences. Via ethnographic analysis drawing jointly on critical race theory, gender and feminist studies, colorblindness and post-racial theories, the paper posits that media production serves for many as catharsis and a tool to handle the exhausting and anxiety-provoking effects of hierarchy’s social bottom. To do so, it highlights narratives of self-identified Black women – as multiply marginalized social subjects – struggling to digest a central social and occupational paradox: the baffling need to juggle if not strike a functional balance between dominant media’s self-congratulatory circulation of colorblindness discourse, and its persisting structural and interpersonal disparities.
PRESENTER BIOGRAPHY: Marlaina H. Martin earned her Ph.D. from the Cultural Anthropology Program at Rutgers University in May 2019. During her time there, she received a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation as well as a Ralph Johnson Bunche Distinguished Graduate Award and University & Louis Bevier Dissertation Completion Fellowship from Rutgers University. Dr. Martin’s research interests include critical race theory, colorblindness, and post-racialism; feminist and Black feminist theory; women's, gender, and sexuality studies; body and embodiment studies; cultural studies and media production studies; and anthropologies of race, gender, and media. Her dissertation, “’Making Their Own’: Creativity, Strategy, and Authority among Black Women Media Makers in New York City,” explores the numerous negotiations, decisions, and compromises that New York City-based Black women independent media makers–as members of a doubly marginalized U.S. social group–navigate in order to cultivate and exercise authority in production and distribution contexts. Currently, Dr. Martin holds the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Visual Culture developed as collaboration between the Department of Anthropology at University of Maryland, College Park and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
