Events

Backlash Blues: Reading Multiethnic Literature for Archives of Care and Resistance in the Face of Dead Futures

Oct 29, 2025 | 6.30-8 p.m. Grounds for Thought in Bowling Green

My project addresses the ongoing backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement, typified by the Supreme Court’s dismantling of Affirmative Action, attacks on D.E.I. initiatives on university campuses, and book bans, and situates our contemporary moment within the broader context of the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and its dismantling of the gains of the Civil Rights and social justice movements. I explore contemporary, literary texts by Black and multiracial authors that pay witness to the material dispossession experienced by communities of color and the discipling of memory or, the simultaneous erasure and selective inclusion of these histories of dispossession by institutions. These texts, I argue, operate as archives that recover histories of care, beauty, and resistance and in so doing, they imagine an infrastructure for more livable futures. During my fellowship, I will develop a chapter for my book proposal, Disciplining Memory, Zoning Life and I will partner with the Toledo Art Museum to host a book club discussion of Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America. Written for a public audience, Desmond’s book explores the infrastructural failures that have exacerbated the racialized wealth gaps in the U.S. and argues for policies that approach housing as the basic human right that it is.

Ultimately, my project is about the relationship between dispossession, memory, and resistance. By hosting a book club discussion of a more accessible text in a space that is free and open to the public, I hope to foster an inclusive conversation about the policies and narratives that have produced many of the inequalities that define our current moment.

Server Farming: Community Sustainability and Infrastructures of the Machine Learning Age

Nov 18, 2025 | 6.30-8 p.m. Wood County District Public Library

Often public engagement with infrastructure development projects is under-organized, fractured into seemingly competing interests, and out-positioned by powerful, global economic actors. As Wood County authorizes the construction of its first Internet data center or “server farm,” many questions remain about the local and regional sustainability of such infrastructures. This proposed ICS project’s intends to connect my ongoing research on communities in Northern Virginia (“Internet Capital of the World”) to new research within NW Ohio in order to create a community “playbook” for increasing effective democratic participation in the production of AI technologies and their geographies of infrastructure, resources, and labor. The growing machine learning or “AI” economy relies on an extensive geography of “server farms,” which intensively consume electricity, water, and land, and have special impacts on organized and unorganized labor. Particularly because of the dispersed (trans-local) and “out-of-sight” aspects of sustainability issues, communities often struggle to communicate across the complex and diverse interests that are impacted by these infrastructures. This project will develop an interdisciplinary framework for community dialogues around sustainability and the development of “AI” infrastructure. Focusing on local government, labor institutions, and environmental scientists, this project will use the audio-visual resources of the BGSU School of Media and Communication to create artifacts to inspire and build community awareness and dialogue. These will be the foundation for more cross-campus and inter-community partnerships and collaboration around community sustainability broadly.