Research

AADHum continues to deepen its commitments to broadening the landscape of Black digital humanities, while also highlighting the numerous places where Black DH intersects with electronic literature, digital storytelling, computational poetics, and public humanities more generally. Through our own boundary-pushing research collaborations with leading scholars in the arts and humanities, AADHum serves as a vibrant center for Black DH research both in the greater Washington, DC area as well as nationally and internationally.

migrastory

Migrastory is an interactive, interdisciplinary project about migration, memory, and the ordinary things that help us survive being away from home. Rooted in my own experience of moving from India to the U.S., it asks what it means to pack up a life, and how objects, rituals, and small acts of community become ways of carrying belonging. The project brings together digital and physical forms, including a text-based story about packing, accompanied by a suitcase-based interactive installation in which everyday objects tell their own migration stories through touch and sound, transforming the act of packing into an encounter with the histories those objects carry. Accompanying these are other works: a web-based clock that measures the smallness and preciousness of time with loved ones, and a series of handcrafted letters that pay tribute to the journey home. Together, these pieces shift migration away from abstraction and bureaucracy and toward intimacy, affect, and joy, insisting on migrant life as complex, creative, and deeply human.