Fall Quarter’s Vibrant PWR Notation Events: DJ Lynnée Denise and Lauren Oakes
PWR’s two Notations continue to thrive not only in their curricular innovation, but also in their development and support of vibrant in-person community events. During Fall Quarter, the Notation in Cultural Rhetorics (NCR) and Notation in Science Communication (NSC) co-hosted successful events, which amplified PWR’s rhetorical capacities within our own communities, across campus, and beyond.
In collaboration with the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA) and IDA’s Director A-lan Holt, PWR Faculty Director and IDA Faculty Director Adam Banks brought DJ Lynnée Denise back to campus and the NCR for “(A) BlackQueerSound: Archiving Sonic Sub-Cultures from NYC to Joburg” at the Stanford Humanities Center on October 16. Part of Black (W)hole: A Black Feminist Art Happening, a broader event bringing together Black Feminist voices across the Bay Area, Denise took her audience through an archival and sonic journey, mapping her trajectory from her previous work in DJ Scholarship–a term she first coined in 2013–to a new intellectual rubric and frontier: “Turntable Epistemology.”
Whereas DJ Scholarship was primarily about comparatively technical, archival labor—chasing samples, digging through crates, examining album cover art, and treating line-note studies as literary study—Turntable Epistemology prioritizes something different as an intellectual and artistic project. It becomes “theoretical care” for a “blues moment,” calling for significant “narratological repair,” specifically for BlackQueer music from the 1980s, which was intensely shaped by the history of the AIDS epidemic. Narratological repair also significantly underwrites Denise’s recent book Why Willie May Thornton Matters (Texas 2023), “a deliberate and crucial act of reclamation, because in the name of Willie Mae Thornton is the sound of Black musical resilience.”
Faculty, staff, and students from across campus packed the room at the Humanities Center, including several PWR Lecturers. As IDA events tend to, this talk brought together students and artists from across campus and also artists and scholars from Oakland, San Francisco, Cleveland, Detroit and London. Denise carefully engaged the audience’s questions on art and scholarship as she went. As Director of Stanford’s Oral Communication Program Doree Allen put it, “I have not been so exhilarated by a speaker in a long time. In the discussion that followed Lynnée Denise’s talk, a graduate student commented on her ‘beautiful mind,’ which echoed my thoughts precisely. Beyond my appreciation of Lynnée Denise’s fierce originality as a scholar, I was also moved by the expansive heart she brings to her work and to her artistic community.”
PWR Lecturer Megan Shields Formato also attested to the talk’s originality, as well as its extraordinary breadth: “Weeks later my mind is still buzzing from DJ Lynnee Denise's remarkable, relentlessly citational talk. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it! What struck me most was the communities she drew together both within her work and in the room at the Humanities Center. The talk took us from dance floors in the Castro at the height of the AIDS epidemic to Jamaica to South Africa to London following threads like the sampling of sounds and the movements of radio signals and amplification technologies. Whatever the opposite of siloed is, that’s what she was doing: connecting the many layered dynamics of (A) Black Queer Sound and mapping those layers in ways that also acknowledged the destruction and pandemics in the world right now and the art and scholarship that responds to it.”
A few weeks later, on November 6, with support from the NSC, Doerr School of Sustainability Writing Specialist Emily Polk and Notation in Science Communication Coordinator Kevin Moore hosted writer, environmental scientist, and former PWR Fellow Lauren Oakes for two writing workshops, co-hosted by the Writing Specialist initiative in the Doerr School of Sustainability, as well as the Environmental Communication Coterm Program in Earth Systems. Both events mark the publication of Oakes’ new book Treekeepers: The Race for a Forested Future, which examines the global reforestation movement.
In the afternoon, in a lecture hall on the Main Quad, Oakes led a workshop on “Storytelling in Science” tailored to undergraduate students and the Notation in Science Communication community, focusing on storytelling in science and strategies for bringing yourself into the narrative as a writer. A further workshop, “The Craft of Narrative Nonfiction: Blending Science and Reporting,” followed in the evening at the O’Donohue Educational Farm, tailored to graduate students, postdocs, and faculty/staff. This workshop foregrounded the writing process in nonfiction genres designed for a popular audience, offering strategies for bringing academic discourse to mainstream audiences, including the nuts and bolts of the publishing world from identifying an agent to drafting and creating effective book proposals.
As Emily Polk reflected after the event, "Lauren has strong connections to the PWR program having worked with us as a fellow several years ago. So it was really special to see her return as a successful author, having just released such a powerful new book, taking the time to give so much thoughtful advice and guidance to our students."
As PWR’s Notations continue to grow, events such as these conversations with DJ Lynnée Denise and Lauren Oakes are a vital component of how we deliver capacious rhetorical knowledge to our own students, our broader campus community, and indeed our many community partners beyond Stanford.
