UBC Department of English Language & Literatures is delighted to congratulate Dr. Kimberly Bain and Dr. Danielle Wong on each winning a 2024 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant.
The Insight Development Grant supports research in its initial stages. It enables the development of new research questions, as well as experimentation with new methods, theoretical approaches and/or ideas.
Read about their winning projects below and join EL&L in congratulating Dr. Wong and Dr. Bain on their achievements.
I CAN’T BREATHE: BLACKNESS AND BREATHING IN NORTH AMERICA
Applicant: Dr. Kimberly Bain
On the evening of May 25, 2020, forty-six-year-old George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin. His final words, captured on camera by bystander Darnella Frazier, was both an indictment and a plea, an appeal and a condemnation: “I can’t breathe.” I CAN’T BREATHE: BLACKNESS AND BREATHING IN NORTH AMERICA explores the histories of Black breath in North America from the 18th century to the contemporary moment.
To understand how we arrive at Floyd’s death, we need to sit with the socio-political and economic, the environmental and biological, as well as the legal and historical formations that subtend his final words. We must pause at the intersection of deadly anti-Blackness, racial capitalism (the $20 bill that started it all), and breathlessness (the pandemic and Chauvin choking Floyd).
When Floyd’s final moments mirror the final moments of other Black people like Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Daniel Prude and many more named and unnamed, how do we attend to the ways breathlessness is not exceptional, but foundational to the everyday experiences of Black people? How do we tell the histories of Black breathlessness in North America? How do we trace the historical and cultural development of Black breathlessness to illumine its role in the operations of anti-Blackness? And how do we attend to the ways Black people have theorized breathlessness long before we took to the streets, chanting “I can’t breathe?”
AMBIENT GREEN SCREENS: CARCERAL COMPOSITES AND OTHER SPECULATIONS IN DIGITAL MATERIALITY
Applicant: Dr. Danielle Wong
When Portland police arrested a Black man whose face did not match surveillance footage of a bank robbery suspect in 2019, they used Photoshop on his line-up photo to remove his facial tattoos and presented the edited image to witnesses. In Sheffield Lake, a police chief used photo-editing software to superimpose a Latino officer’s head onto an image of a hot sauce bottle. These events illuminate the carceral imaginaries of today’s ubiquitous green screen, which has emerged through the always-on smartphone and computational visions of an infinitely recordable and editable world.
My project queries how the ambient green screen, which I use to name algorithmic orientations of self to space afforded by today’s communication technologies, reveal the racial logics of transposable and recomposable bodies and environments embedded in settler colonial genealogies of policing. “Ambient Green Screens” traces a longer history of policing’s relationship to ocular technologies in North America, from the development of 19th century police photography and speculative hand-drawn portraits to the use of prosumer VFX tools on TikTok and Instagram. It also considers, through creative collaboration, how artistic experiments in everyday image compositing techniques alternatively interrogate racial capitalist rationales of prediction and property.
