Announcement: Spring 2019 Digital Matters Graduate Fellows
November 9, 2018Job: Digital Matters Program Assistant
November 27, 2018We're pleased to announce the winners of the first Digital Matters Faculty Grants, Prof. Wendy Wischer and Prof. Lourdes Alberto!
Digital Matters will continue to award several faculty grants each semester for the next several years.
Wendy Wischer
Assistant Professor
Department of Art & Art History
Working title: Battlegrounds
Project Description: Land ownership, management and policy are pressing issues in the Western US where over 46% percent of all land is owned and managed by Federal Agencies. Controversy exists around the current and future plans for managing this territory due to conflicting stakeholder values. At the same time, in many states throughout the US, women’s health and regulations of their bodies are also controlled by government agencies. I am interested in exploring where management and policy of both land and the female body collide. Where metaphorical similarities exist in hopes of discovering a greater understanding that might hold the potential for solutions to better ways of managing and better policies.
This creative exploration will use a variety of digital processes to capture video footage from above, from the surface, and within. This footage will then be projected outward, staking claims.
Being female, residing in the Western US, a stakeholder in the public lands of Utah, a stakeholder of my own body, I am compelled to explore these issues in hopes of telling a story, that may not be linear, that will be both public and private, and may challenge the status quo.
Bio: Born in Wisconsin 1971, Wendy Wischer currently lives and works in Salt Lake City, Utah, after relocating from Miami, Florida where she lived and worked for over 15 years. She received an MFA from Florida State University,1995 and a BFA from the University of Wisconsin Madison,1993. With a focus on artwork in a variety of media from sculptural objects, to installations, to video, sound and public works. She is the recipient of numerous grants including the Pollock-Krasner Grant, the South Florida Consortium, the Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, the Utah Division of Arts & Museums Visual Arts Fellowship and recently several prominent research grants from the University of Utah where she is an Assistant Professor in Sculpture Intermedia. Wendy has exhibited extensively nationally, and her international exhibits include Spain, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Canada, Italy and Israel. She is an alumni of the Creative Capitol Professional development program and her work is part of several public collections including the Perez Art Museum, Art Bank Art in Public Places Miami, Art in Public Places Miami Beach, the Boca Museum of Art in Baca Raton Florida, the Colorado State Art Collection and the Utah Division of Arts & Museums Collection.
Lourdes Alberto
Associate Professor
Department of English
Project Description: With the Digital Humanities Grant, Dr. Alberto will collect and digitize indigenous Oaxacan archives based on the activism of female Oaxacan community members in Los Angeles. Oaxaca, a state in southern Mexico, is home to the largest and most ethnically and linguistically diverse indigenous population in Mexico. Indigenous Oaxacans have migrated en masse to Los Angeles since the 1970s and constitute the largest indigenous population in California. Oaxacan communities have been actively making indigenous culture, organizing politically and socially since the 1970s, but much of this activity remains undocumented in any formal way. Building an Oaxacan archive will help us to think deeply about how mobility/migration informs the formation of indigenous archives. The digitizing of archive can help us think more expansively about the decolonial, indigenous archives writ large, community/kinship and race/ethnicity and specifically address how ideas about gender and indigeneity within the contexts of migration, diaspora, and removal. Dr. Alberto’s goal is that preserving this archive will offer generative staring points for collaboration in the fields of Indigenous, Native, Latin American, Latino/a/x studies.
Bio: Dr. Lourdes Alberto is an indigenous Latina (Zapotec) scholar from Los Angeles, CA. An associate professor at the University of Utah, she holds a dual appointment in the Department of English and Division of Ethnic Studies. Dr. Alberto’s research employs a comparative Indigenous studies and Latina/o/x Studies approach to understand how race/ethnicity and colonialism work together to shape the cultural expressions, political and social realities of indigenous peoples and Latinos/as in the Americas. Most recently, she has published her work in Critical Ethnic Studies Journal and Latinos Studies Journal. Dr. Alberto’s book Mexican American Indigeneities is forthcoming with NYU Press.
