Best of Orlando 2017

It is great to be recognized for my interdisciplinary work. Orlando Weekly's Best of Orlando name Afrofantastic, along with The Black Figure in the European Imaginary and Posing Beauty, as Best Exhibition Triad.  Recognition for work outside the classroom is a complicated exercise for the working academic. Taking the time to think about project across platforms is central to my practice. I talk about the "Classroom as Platform" in part because of scholarship in Public History that talks about public humanities practice.  As a teacher/scholar with a heavy institutional focus on pedagogy, the need to make the classroom experience work can translate into an understanding of how frameworks and differing ways of learning can be leveraged to create engagement.  For Afrofantastic, the course was about thinking about the content and practice of making an exhibition. We talked about the content in class, but we spent lab time in the Cornell Fine Arts Museum (CFAM) considering what happens when you enter a museum and how that experience creates a kind of public knowledge. The exhibit needed to work as an exhibit and I made some curatorial/content focus decisions in planning that I think helped it be successful.  As I've ventured into these mixed modes of scholarly production, I've noted the feedback about the necessity of tracking, documenting, and explaining the impact. I'm going to call this a win and think about the next iteration of the class with new set of goals that build on the learning success and firms up the outcome structure.