Welcoming New Team Members to Create Caribbean
Updates from Create Caribbean and our community partners.
Introducing our new Faculty Fellow - Isis Semaj-Hall
Dr. Isis Semaj-Hall is the Riddim Writer. She is a Jamaican-born, Bronx-raised literary scholar, decolonial feminist, and cultural analyst with a creative practice that is nurtured by sound. As the Riddim Writer, she co-creates music and sound art as a part of an experimental futurist collective called groundsound. She hosts the podcast “For Posterity” where she interviews Caribbean writers, musicians, visual artists, and inspiring citizens.
As a Caribbean storytelling advocate, she has dubbed poetry and published non-fiction and fiction works. She is also co-founder and editor of PREE: Caribbean Writing. With a commitment to opening-up access, her cultural analysis and critical scholarship have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, in non-academic outlets, and can be heard on the 2022 Carnegie Hall produced Afrofuturism podcast. She is currently completing her monograph “On the B-Side: Storytelling Meets Caribbean Futurism in Infinite Dub,” a critical exploration of word-sound-power, deep listening, environmental wisdom, and Caribbean identities.
Dr. Semaj-Hall is the Caribbean literature and popular culture specialist in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in Kingston, Jamaica.
Check out Dr. Semaj-Hall’s website, Instagram, and Twitter profiles.
Introducing our new Community Research Fellow - Petrea Honychurch Seaman
Petrea Honychurch Seaman is an author and multidisciplinary creative working in web and graphic design. Her background is in landscape architecture (BSLA) from Colorado State University, and for years worked with Dominica’s government as a physical planner and land-use officer. During that time, she headed various teams and projects, one of which developed Design Guidelines for Sustainable Tourism Development. She then shifted her focus towards web, graphic and print design, tackling projects that included signage, copy, illustrations, landscape concepts, branding, book design and WordPress websites. Notable projects provided interpretive signage and custom maps for the capital Roseau and various Tourism destination sites around Dominica, as well as in the airport and ferry terminals. Passionate about the environment, preservation of knowledge and storytelling, she enjoys finding creative and effective ways to convey that information.
She is a member of the Waitukubuli Artists Association (WAA) and a former board member of SHAPE - the Society of Historic Architectural Preservation and Enhancement.
Her first children’s picture book, Good Night My Sweet Island, was published by Papillote Press in 2023.
Check out her website and Instagram profile.
New Program - Code & Culture
Create Caribbean Research Institute (CCRI) is proud to announce the launch of Code & Culture, an in-person weekend technology program for students in grades 3 to 5 in Dominica. CCRI has partnered with two primary schools for this new initiative which is the first of its kind.
Code & Culture aims to bring children closer to their heritage through technology by equipping them with digital skills that can be used to explore Dominican and Caribbean culture in innovative ways. To accomplish this, primary schools with computer labs will be “adopted” into the program and each school will host face-to-face classes on Saturdays during the school term. At this time, Mahaut Primary School and Newtown Primary School have already come on board, with other schools expected to join in the future. Students will experiment with mobile application, web and game development, robotics, graphic design and animation each week. This program is supported by a US$75,000 grant from the Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Equity Fund.
The Adopt a School Program began on Saturday, February 17, 2024. Our team were at Mahaut Primary School where they taught Scratch.
Apply to be the CDSC’s Virtual Artist Residency
Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (CDSC) are excited to announce the Call for Proposals for The Caribbean Digital Virtual Artist Residency 2024!
In partnership with @aliceyardinsta the residency supports artists in developing digital media around Caribbean studies and its diaspora. The Caribbean Digital Virtual Artist’s Residency seeks to support the development of “born-digital” creative work primarily based on digital media and tools rather than analog work digitized for presentation or storage. Artists may work in any digital media, including but not limited to images, sound, and text. Also integral to the residency is the artist’s engagement with Caribbean Digital Humanities, a multidisciplinary field of study that brings digital technologies into the research, analysis, visualization, and application of the traditional humanities. During the residency, the artist is expected to engage in dialogue with Caribbean Digital Humanities scholars to enrich their creative and research practices.
The deadline to apply is April 1, 2024, at 11:59 EST. Make sure to go to The Caribbean Digital Website for more details.
Call for Submission: Journal of Folklore and Education
The 2024 Journal of Folklore and Education seeks submissions that explore “disruption” and “migration” in relation to the process of reimagining home and tradition. They are interested in contributions that situate creativity and cultural production in moments and landscapes of flux and transformation, and how those affected by these forces forge strategies that disrupt established paradigms. Thus, topics such as identity, inclusion and exclusion, memory, transformation, and community also inform this issue.
They are interested in contributions that address, for example:
People’s experiences during and in response to migrations and/or displacements of different sorts (domestic, international, rural-urban, voluntary and forced, in response to climate, for economic reasons, etc.)
Cultural realignment (coalition building, mutual aid, rethinking/rebuilding communities);
Stories or examples of how people disrupt narratives of harm and pathology related to migration with cultural production that represents resilience, agency, transformation, generative practices
Praxis—the work we do—examples of how the work of educators, folklorists, or culture bearers/artists directly intervene in or disrupt conventions, persistent issues, or chronic conditions.
The Journal of Folklore and Education welcomes contributions in many formats, including interviews, multimedia, photo essays, notes (a shorter format report), and lesson plans. Submissions are due March 15, 2024. For more information, go to their website.
Connect with Create Caribbean on:
Facebook
Whatsapp
Twitter
Instagram
Website