Faculty Research Lecture: Dodd Interdisciplinary Fellows

Dodd Interdisciplinary Fellows Amy Bonnaffons, Leanne Purdum and Sara Black will present lectures focused on their ongoing research on January 15, from 12:20 PM to 1:20 PM.

The Lamar Dodd School of Art is a community of makers and scholars dedicated to pursuing advanced research in the fields of Art, Art History and Art Education. Several times each year, faculty share current research and work in progress with colleagues and students, affirming this shared sense of purpose. These lectures are open to the public.

“A Prison Bus for Immigrant Babies” or “Specialized Transport for fun”?

Leanne Purdum

My talk focuses on the complicated mixture of discourses of helping, care and niceness with those of immigration enforcement and policing. What happens when we make a “nicer” jail, instead of questioning the existence of prisons and detention centers more broadly? This interplay creates spaces such as “baby jails” and specialized buses for detained children. This talk is one piece of my dissertation about U.S. “family detention”, or detention of immigrant children with a parent. I share analysis from my volunteer work in the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, and advocacy in Athens, Georgia. Much immigration research understandably focuses on the overt violence to children during detention, perhaps most clearly highlighted by the Trump administration’s policy of mass family separations and camps at the border. However, my work considers the complex discourses of helping, care, and humanitarianism found in legal struggles over family detention. I discuss how the discourses of care and helping interplay with those of enforcement and criminalized migration, shaping policy and the day-to-day workings of detention, in “family” detention centers and beyond.

“Visual Memoir: Representing the Hybrid Self on the Page.” 

Amy Bonnaffons

Writers, visual artists and comics creators are doing exciting work now in the area of hybrid memoir and autofiction.  In my talk, I will outline a few of the ways that these creators are conjuring fresh new possibilities for the combination of word and image, and will discuss the special potential such texts possess for addressing topics such as gender, sexuality, trauma, and the intersection of personal and collective history.  I will briefly discuss my own hybrid memoir-in-progress and my creative path thus far.