A Farewell to Fall and Wishes for Spring
Winter’s chill settled over McKeldin Mall as the BCaT Lab wrapped up a vibrant and community-driven fall semester. The semester culminated in a week-long collaborative mural project led by the Lab’s artist-in-residence, Maïa Walcott. The overall project, titled Black Homeplaces, aims to use VR/XR tech to digitally illustrate the ever-changing sites of Black homeplaces, highlighting Black placemaking practices across the African diaspora. The BCaT Lab invited students, faculty, and community members to paint objects reminding them of home on smaller, individual canvases. These interchangeable canvases represent the breadth of different Homeplaces, while also highlighting the fluidity of even a single ‘home.’ Together, these individual contributions and Maia’s recreation of the frontroom form a shared scene, a visual reflection of memory, care, and interconnected across Black diasporic experiences.
The mural was unveiled alongside the Lab’s Art and the Archive panel, featuring Maia Walcott, Amber Robles-Gordon, and keondra bills freemyn as our panelists. This hybrid conversation explored Black art as a method for worldbuilding, highlighting how art responds to archival silences and holds diasporic histories together across time and space. We are deeply grateful to the panelists for sharing their insights and wisdom with our community.
The mural has come to represent what the Black Communication & Technology Lab strives to be: an academic homeplace. Although housed in the University of Maryland community, this collaborative project brought communities together from different physical spaces. Our Black Homeplaces mural ultimately reflects the Lab’s ongoing commitment to radical intentionality, care, and collective being.
The picture frames in the mural are to hold attendees paintings. The mural was painted by our artist in residence, Maïa Walcott.
Throughout the semester, the BCaT hosted a series of workshops and learning sessions highlighting different methods of doing and ‘creating’ Black digital humanities research, and professional development opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Fall’s BCaT Learns sessions showcased projects such as In the Same Boats, a project mapping the locations of Black creatives across time and place, and the Black Lit Network, a data visualization project showcasing common trends of Black authors across the diaspora; amongst others. Participants also shared their own work, exchanging ideas and reflecting on the expanding possibilities of digital scholarship. That same day, our BCaT Applies session offered guidance on navigating academic conferences, focusing on how to navigate networking and research.
In addition, the BCaT Lab hosted two information sessions for our new CO-LAB, Automating Black Joy. Led by the BCaT Lab’s director Catherine Knight-Steele, Automating Black Job centers critical approaches to AI through the lens of Black feminist inquiry, joy, and liberation. Participants learned about the project's goals. And began forming early collaborative ideas. Although the call for participation has now closed, we look forward to sharing updates as these projects continue to develop.
The fall semester also included a hybrid retreat, concluding our Black Homeplaces CO-LAB. Led by the Lab’s associate director Rianna Walcott, this retreat marked the culmination of work completed by our 32 collaborators, VR engineer consultants, and graduate students of the MS GIS program. Next semester, the 18 research projects will be experienced within an interactive virtual reality environment modelled after the Black Homeplace. We are incredibly proud of the care and creativity demonstrated by our collaborators, and cannot wait to showcase the work each team has produced.
As we move into the spring semester, the BCaT Lab is excited to build on this momentum. More details about our upcoming programming and workshops will be announced soon, and we look forward to another semester of learning, creating, and imagining together.
