At September Sessions 2022, Directors Adam Banks and Marvin Diogenes shared the much-welcome news that PWR would be resuming its Research Awards starting fall quarter. After a quick call for proposals, several of our colleagues received PWR Research Awards in October to support their creative and scholarly work for the upcoming year. Read on below to learn about their ongoing projects.
Kevin Moore
“My research grant supported a trip to Lazkaoko Beneditarren Fundazioa, an archive in Lazkao, Basque Country (Spain), which houses a large collection of political stickers and other visual media from the period of the instauration of democracy in Spain following the end of the Franco dictatorship. In collaboration with my colleague Dr. Iker Arranz Otaegui (UCLA), I was able to examine a number of materials as part of my ongoing work comparing visual propaganda and rhetoric in societies reemerging into democracy after periods of fascism and authoritarianism. Iker and I have previously published a preliminary account on this archive here: “Visual Art and Propaganda Ecologies in the Basque Country: A Sample of Guernica Motifs from the Benedictine Sticker Archives (1978–1989)”. Of particular note on this trip, we identified and photographed a number of materials foregrounding ecological concerns in the Basque region during this period, which was an unexpected discovery; this thread in particular may become part of a future publication or possible exhibition. These materials will also have a role in my PWR 2 course “Propaganda and Rhetoric.” Most of the items in the archive are in duplicate or triplicate, and Iker and I remain hopeful that we may be able to facilitate a donation or purchase for the collections of Stanford’s Hoover Library and Archive in the near future.”
Kathleen Tarr
The focus of the grant was my annual Getting Played Symposium on Equity in the Entertainment Industry and Awards. This year 2023 was the Symposium’s ninth year, and the theme “The Perils and Promise of Activism” purposely complimented the career of keynote Erin Merritt. Merritt is a multi-faceted theater maker—director, dramaturg, adaptor, translator, coach, teacher, producer, and arts consultant. She founded the award-winning all-female Shakespeare company Woman’s Will in 1998 which in its twelve seasons radically redefined how Bay Area theaters employed women on stage and off and helped lead a movement toward parity which continues today. Recently diagnosed with ALS, Merritt delivered the keynote as her last public speech (reader, Melissa Hillman) and received the Getting Played Equity Award for her ongoing work. Concluding the event was a conversation and audience Q&A with Arianna Caplan, LCSW/MPH. Caplan has supported trainings on Restorative Practices at Stanford University’s Summer Equity Institute in addition to Oakland and Los Angeles Unified School Districts. She shared important information about how activism supports well-being, why some people are threatened by and retaliate against activists, and how to care for yourself including when you feel that others are experiencing more benefit from your activism than you are. Other speakers also shared significant insights, but my personal highlight was after the event when Merritt embodied the director-activist and encouraged Shirley Smallwood – who had performed pieces from her solo show in-progress – to continue pursuing a full production. I felt inspired that Merritt, while adjusting and adapting to the challenges of ALS, remained true to the core that galvanized the tribute to her in the first place.
My grant also permitted me to continue championing equity at other events like the first annual Women in Film Summit at Cal Lutheran, but it is really the Symposium that rejuvenates. I thank PWR for the ongoing opportunity.
Irena Yamboliev
The research grant has allowed me to make progress on a project about forms of ecological thinking. Specifically, I’m interested in the rhetoric of how we humans relate to whales, and how museums enter into the ways we talk to ourselves about our relationships to whales—the genres museums employ to depict the history of the whaling industry. This summer, I visited sites related to whaling history in New England, including the largest whaling museums, in New Bedford and Nantucket, Massachusetts. It was a very emotional experience, actually, and in some ways heartening. I was pleasantly surprised that one of my hypotheses got contradicted: I did not find, as I had expected to, full-throated celebrations of the heyday of the whaling industry as a triumph of human ingenuity and grit over nature’s brute strength. Instead, the story of whaling was told thoughtfully and with much compassion for the very difficult lives of the whalers. It was also thought-provoking to notice the discrepancies among exhibits even within a single museum. One very striking pattern is the way the museums straddled different discourses: documenting natural history and marine biology; telling histories of the rise and decline of particular whaling centers; documenting whale protection and ocean conservation today; engaging with climate change; engaging with indigenous cultures’ relationships to whales. I felt acutely the importance of viewing the whole of each museum, comprehensively, and considering the parts in relation to each other—the way we emphasize to our students that research is more than just finding quotes to support your claim, that you must engage each source holistically.
I’m currently designing a class around this topic, bridging the case studies I gathered in New England with examples from the history of our relations to whales in the Bay Area. One very striking pattern I want to share with students is that each whaling museum I visited owned at least one skeleton of a whale, which was prominently displayed hung from the ceiling. It was spectacular, but at the same time, the museums were aware that they would need to account for how they had acquired these—to negotiate the ethics of displaying the remains of endangered, protected, emotionally and socially sophisticated creates, with the fascination. So, the museums had generated elaborate exhibits explaining, sometimes in video format as well as text, how they had come by the whales (which had all washed up on nearby beaches, injured and past the hope of saving). The way the explanations wove between emotions, doing justice to the magnificence of the creature while conveying the excitement of acquiring a rare specimen, was fascinating and revealed the museums’ awareness of their multiple aims, constraints, and audiences. I think students would find this fascinating too.
As I envision different ways to communicate what I found, I’m thinking about how firmly we tie environmentalist efforts to the ethos of a particular regional culture. The whaling museums I visited made a point of calling out Japan and Iceland as continuing violators of international laws protecting whales—though they also acknowledged that about 40% of the whale meat consumed by Iceland is eaten by tourists visiting that country. Meanwhile, the Monterrey Bay aquarium is proud of its pioneering efforts in environmental conservation. How to forward environmentalist efforts while being culturally sensitive: this is one among many questions I look forward to exploring with students.
