Hi Aleena,

I really love how you outline your thinking here in regard to following buzzwords as the language used to describe divas changes over time, and how you used this language to develop a historical understanding of how "diva" has taken on many different meanings throughout time. Your thinking inspires me to follow language more closely as well, especially as I'm thinking about how certain connotations for words might change depending on region or speaker. Thank you!

• What new ideas, challenges, or other issues have you encountered with regard to your project (this might include data collection, information that contradicts your assumptions or the assertions of others, materials that have enriched your understanding of the topic or led you to change your project, etc.)? How have these ideas or challenges shaped the bigger picture of your research? Has the scope or focus of your topic changed since you began this project? If so, how?

One new challenge I've encountered is studying music without scores or sheet music. For example, songs like "No Weapon" by Fred Hammond don't have readily-available scores, or the context in which they are sung has so many variables, riffs, or improvisations that are left to the singer(s), so the score isn't an encompassing source I can use. This has helped me ground my thinking in different parts of the archive, or learning differently, such as going to Pentecostal Church to understand the Pentecostal gospel tradition and learning about music theory by practicing singing hymns at church, rather than sitting with an instrument and trying to memorize the chord structures/rhythm on my own. This has helped me also put my project in a broader context beyond the academy, where I am learning to think and learn from sources that aren't just pen-and-paper or historical records. In doing so, I've been able to make new connections across disciplines, such as the urban planning of Indianola, MS, as it connects to churches as a site for political movement and also for religious congregation. This has helped me understand how each individual puzzle, from geography to religion to historical fiction, can fit into a broader understanding of survival, resistance, and "otherwise possibilities," as Ashon Crawley might describe it in Blackpentecostal Breath.

• What research resources have proven particularly useful to you as you continue your research?

ProQuest has been extraordinarily helpful for me to understand the musical history of sites of antiblack violence in areas I am studying, ranging from Kansas City (MO) to Indianola (MS) to Oakland (TN). Following historical newspapers has helped me understand how events like the backlash against Minnie Cox, the first Black female postmaster in MS, shaped people's movements in the mid-20th century, and connected to the rich history of blues in Indianola. I'm putting these documents in conversation with recorded oral histories of social movements as well, along with music throughout the ages, such as BB King's Indianola Mississippi Seeds, to understand the ways a city grows and changes in reaction to factors like migration and urbanization.

Dear Kira, 

I really resonated with your relationship to your research as listening for voices, frequencies, that often elide or are excluded from the dominant archives. I'm eager to learn more about the ways that returning to history, reckoning with history, and demanding from history can expose new traditions that have always been there, that we can remix and learn from and develop as we apply them to our ever-changing present stories in the making, particularly in arts and media, across sonic and visual cultures.

• While all Laidlaw Scholars will be presenting their research at the Columbia Undergraduate Research Symposium in the fall, what are the more immediate expectations that you have for your research? Are you writing a paper? Will your research be part of a larger scientific study? Do you hope to produce an annotated bibliography that you reflect on down the line? Is your research now the first phase of a project you’ll continue to work on throughout the year, and/or next summer? Now that we are nearing the one month mark of the program, please write about your expectations for your research.

I am in debt to Dr. Redmond for her guidance and support even as I assist her in her creative nonfiction book project, which she has been working on before I joined this project. I'm hopeful that I can continue assisting her, and learning from and with her, while what I've learned has informed my own independent interests in musical tradition as a counterarchival method. I'd like to continue thinking of this method as I'm learning more about her research, particularly in regard to exile as a mode of flight. Our research this summer focuses on the intermezzo -- on Black people who have survived antiblack violence -- and I am interested in the musical tradition of Black political exiles, such as the late Nehanda Abiodun, who Sam Green from the documentary 32 Sounds made a mixtape for. I'm thinking about my next summer now, and how I'd like to work with radio, local orchestras, or music education programs to apply my understanding of music as a survival and archival tradition. 

• Why does your research matter? Explain the significance of the question you are investigating, and why you are interested in it.

Dr. Redmond's research matters to me because she has emphasized throughout this entire project that this is a recovery of Black Life. I am interested in this because I have been playing music since before I could speak fluent English. I'm not very good at performing, but it has given me, in my own positionality, the understanding of how music informs and sustains communities. And as I engage with, and assist Dr. Redmond's research, her focus on music has helped me understand the ways we reckon with antiblack state violence -- particularly policing and prisons. As I'm thinking about my own unique relationship to policing, prisons, and white supremacy, this project has helped me understand that there are methods of survival, resistance, and world-building in the Black musical radical tradition as counterarchival. Dr. Redmond says every system of domination is always changing and evolving to beat back each variation of our resistance, but because these systems have to change and adapt so frequently, there are often weak points, hairline cracks, where we can apply pressure. I believe, fully, that her work exposes, and presses, on those weak points. I am invested in continuing to apply pressure with her, in whatever form that may take, because this project helps me understand that music is not just a history, but a history as a survival strategy.

Hi Aleena,

I really resonated with your qualms between truth and clickbait. It makes me wonder, what clickbait or sensationalism can reveal about the dominant attitudes, desires, and how they shaped stories of their time, or how certain clickbait narratives are formed. I'd also love to learn more about how you're able to trace stories and life throughout the archives while working with sources that might be difficult to verify.

• What are some of the ethical issues that you are grappling with in your research? What are some of the ways in which you are responding to these questions?

One ethical issue I am grappling with is that of the lives we are tracing in this work, two of them are minors: Ralph Yarl and Aderrien Murry. Ralph Yarl, in particular, has not issued as many publicly-facing statements as Aderrien Murry has. This makes it difficult to understand and trace their musical life based off of news reports and state records, both of which focus on the details of violence and harm that follow a narrative that often individualizes antiblack violence or frames it as an aberration (when it is the opposite). I feel that it would be unethical to reach out to Yarl directly without speaking to the adults in his life first, so after speaking with Dr. Redmond, Giselle and I drafted research questions to send out to Yarl's parents, music directors, and attorney, which Dr. Redmond helped us edit and send. As I'm thinking about responding to this ethical qualm of placing a large extractive and emotional burden of work upon a young person, Dr. Redmond's feedback on our questions has been invaluable: she has asked us to consider this not as a journalistic project, and not as a way to determine "what really happened," but rather as a creative nonfiction project, to trace and illuminate Black life through centering the music each young person follows and plays and loves. In this way, I have learned to frame my research questions as more open-ended, giving respondents more freedom in telling their stories and including details they find important to be included in the archives (which often are not in state records/are often discarded as unimportant/irrelevant by mainstream news coverage), and avoiding leading questions, which avoids pigeonholing respondents into following narratives that we are trying to disinvest from. This thinking about research ethics has helped me understand assisting Dr. Redmond's project as a work of Black Life, capital L, and what it means to recover and tarry with Black Life as in conversation, in tension, with what Dr. Redmond has written about as the "inventory form" (the ever-accelerating siege of antiblack violence, of saying names, of saying more names) that is also present in musical tradition.

• As you continue your research, have you considered alternative viewpoints in your investigation? If so, how have these alternative viewpoints enriched or changed your project?

I wrote above how I was reckoning with the idea of "what really happened" -- of body cam footage, state trooper reports, car crash records that may never be fully accessed. And maybe they will be -- in time, in labor. But Dr. Redmond has helped me look for alternative writings of history through music, such as Aderrien Murry's ties to the Pentecostal Gospel tradition in his singing of "No Weapon," which has helped me understand this project as a tracing of the Black musical radical tradition throughout history as it is tied to Black migration (i.e. the Pentecostal migration from the South to the Midwest as it correlates with the emergence of Blues), Black Geographies, breath, medicine, and other interdisciplinary investigations. In doing so, I have learned to listen at a different register, one that James C. Scott referred to as "infrapolitics," but more specifically, Robin D.G. Kelley's reading of infrapolitics in Race Rebels, where he describes the resistance of the Black working class through actions normally deemed so small they might seem apolitical (breaking the milkshake machine, rolling sleeves up a certain length, twisting a cap a certain angle). These small moments, for example, when Aderrien describes that he wants to be a doctor, or the rhythm and meter at which he sings in interviews, are the pieces of evidence that I hold onto tightly and cherish in my work, because Dr. Redmond has taught me to listen carefully for what might otherwise be discarded or ignored in an unquestioning pursuit of "what really happened."

Hi Grace!

I really resonated with your second comment about research disclosure, and archives that are withheld to us. For me, police reports and court records are often sealed (particularly in the most recent case of Andrew Lester, who shot Ralph Yarl in April, where a judge ruled this week to partially seal Lester's file). For me, I've found that these archives are often manipulated and censored so that there is no "true" picture other than the foremost narratives of antiblack violence and Black death. However, this has made me think more closely about Dr. Redmond (the faculty member I'm assisting) and her project goal: she has made it clear that this is a project about Black life, and the ways we trace and recover this counterarchival are through different forms of documentation, imagination, and an understanding that much of institutional archival and information will not tell us a story that we are looking for, similarly to your critiques of environmental policy. Your post got me thinking about how ecologies are documented and traced through non-institutional means, and what that might teach us -- for example, indigenous and First Nations foodways or land stewardship.

Thank you!

• Last week the trainings and discussions we had cut across the disciplines. How does the interdisciplinary nature of this program, the fact that students are focusing on such a diverse range of projects, help you think about your project and/or your academic interests?

Meeting students who are also working on music, though from different methodologies or disciplines, really helps me understand new techniques and approaches to understanding music as a counter/archival practice, which I'm really grateful for! Another thing I appreciated was the opportunity to connect with students in the social sciences -- for example, I met with Emily Schmidt, the Government Information and Journalism Librarian, last Wednesday with students who were working on projects in the social sciences, and got to learn more about accessing court records and general public records, which was a helpful overlap in disciplines -- even though these documents are not the focus of my research, I need to access some of them to contextualize and ground my narration of historical events, particularly in terms of court records for cases like Ralph Yarl, which might reveal glimpses of the music that Yarl was practicing or playing in the moments before Andrew Lester shot him. 

• As you focus more fully on your individual research projects this week, what strategies or lessons from the discussions we had last week remain front and center for you?

One of the biggest strategies I'm keeping in mind is how to synthesize diverse leadership skills, as I'm working with another student to assist a faculty member. We're both very flexible thinkers, and I've noticed that they always help me remain grounded and organized in my research through creating documents and organizing our findings, which lets me stick to my direction of research instead of branching off too quickly. This has helped me particularly with drafting questions to ask regarding document or musical access, such as finding orchestral scores or performance repertoires.