Cultural Studies Graduate Student Berette Macaulay Recognized for Research on Embodied Memory & Identity in Black Diaspora

Multidisciplinary artist, writer, and Cultural Studies graduate student Berette Macaulay has received a number of honors recognizing her scholarship recently. She was selected to present her capstone research titled “Embodied Witness” at the Tilting Axis conference on “Beyond Trend: Decolonisation and Art Criticism.” The conference was held at the Memorial ACTe Museum in Guadeloupe in June 2019. Her participation was supported by travel grants from the School of IAS and the Graduate School.

Macaulay also received the Ottenberg-Winans Fellowship from the Jackson School of International Studies African Studies Program in order to conduct ethnographic research in Sierra Leone in December 2019.

She has also been accepted to present her research at the Ethnicity, Race and Indigenous Peoples Conference (ERIP) at Gonzaga University in September 2019.

Macaulay describes her research project as follows: "For people displaced by the historical complexities of coloniality, finding home in the body is an empowering and restorative work in (re)claiming socio-cultural presences as survivance. My research centralizes somatic mappings of communication and identity among geographically disparate Westernized black cultures. This project is a collective-memory ethnography documenting oral soundings, facial expressions, and pedestrian gestures as vocabularies common to my homelands of Jamaica and Sierra Leone. Through this work I assert that such embodiments hold equal archival authorities of knowledge as any other language."

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