Powerful Voices Cohort
We are seeking 20 students for a unique Engagements cohort experience. The Powerful Voices cohort supplies a year-long platform for the celebration of diverse cultural perspectives in our modern world. Integrating explorations of Black theatre, African-influenced tap and ballet, African storytelling, Indigenous experiences, identity politics, and cultural resilience, students will learn how to undertake original research in historic archives, acquire culturally appropriate techniques for critical historical analysis, and learn from groundbreaking innovators who return agency to forgotten or silenced voices. This cohort invites students to engage with and interrogate how historic and contemporary voices from multiple perspectives have changed systems of power and privilege. It also prompts us to consider our own roles, as individuals and as a public institution of higher education, in creating and shaping narratives.
The cohort will fulfill the four Engagements Pillars through a year-long sequence of courses. Each course offers fully paid visits to local sites and activities, including the Monacan Indian Nation, local theatre/dance productions, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, the Albemarle-Charlottesville Historical Society, and sites and archives around UVA Grounds. A particularly special feature of this cohort is its partnership with community residents and activists, many of whom have contributed to the design and content of these four courses. Our community partners will share with the cohort some of their personal and powerful experiences.
Students should be prepared to attend at least one site visit or event per quarter.
To Apply
Answer the following prompt in your pre-enrollment survey (150 - 200 words):
Consider a book, painting, song, or place that “speaks” to you. How and why do you listen? What are the roles of familiarity and difference in the cultivation of interest?
Courses
Engaging Aesthetics: Performing the Black Aesthetic
Eric Ramirez-Weaver/Leslie Scott-Jones
Western artistic pedagogy inherently hinders and alters how people of a global majority enter creative processes and spaces. This remains true even when modern theatrical productions or concert dance emphasize alterity, global styles or traditions. In this class, using the creative processes of theater and dance, you will experience different perspectives on and about stage based production. You will identify key aspects of the Black aesthetic, and gain the ability to unpack the tacit underlying assumptions which inform global creative practices, commonly referred to as ideological frameworks. Utilizing history, scripts, staged works, and classic performances, students will evaluate dance, theatrical and literary form and structure in order to unpack the lived experiences of the global majority, explore alternatives, and critically interrogate how and why form, function, rhythm, and performance create and support identity. Weekly we will approach our course through a series of juxtapositions between theatrical and dance creations which allow us to explore common themes and pose complementary questions.
Empirical and Scientific Engagement: Reading Archival Methodologies
Sarah Richardson
How do we know what we think we know? Reading Archives will examine traditional methodologies of understanding historic moments, places and events. Students will be able to analyze how histories have been preserved and are represented. This work will often reveal voices who have been historically silenced—leading to conversations of systemic oppression and lack of accessibility to marginalized communities. These discussions will lead the class to uncover ways to research and explore non-traditional archives. Methods in this class will expand beyond traditional archives such as exhibits, museums, archival collections, and historical societies to non-traditional archives such as graves, monuments, tours, and descendant videos. Critical conversations surrounding the benefits and limitations of archives in regard to equity are necessary in understanding the continued social and political impacts of research methodologies. We will address how non-traditional archives can be used as an equitable resource to recover histories of a place steeped in violence and historical and cultural oppression.
Engaging Differences: Telling Our Stories! Our Words, Our Worlds
Anne Rotich
What happens when only one single story gets told and who gets left out? In this course, students will explore the power of telling stories as a tool for identity, resistance, and reclaiming cultural memory. From precolonial narratives to contemporary stories in film, music, and literature, we will explore the creative expressions of African communities in the past and their defiance of the single story. Every week we will explore personal narratives that center African experiences as told by Africans themselves while emphasizing stories that disrupt stereotypes and offer deeper, fuller understandings of Africa and African life across time and space. Students will critically examine how stories have been used to marginalize and how storytelling remains a radical act of survival, joy, and transformation. Students will have an opportunity to share their own stories, sample stories of African refugee immigrants, and develop digital stories based on their interests arising from this course.
Ethical Engagements: You are on Monacan Land
Catherine Walden
This course offers students the opportunity to consider what they have learned from the previous three courses in light of the experiences of local Tribal Nations. UVA stands on the ancestral lands of the Monacan Indian Nation, a federally recognized sovereign Nation headquartered in Amherst, Virginia, one hour south of Charlottesville. Through the lens of ethics, this class will explore the history and present-day situation of the Monacan Nation. You will learn directly from citizens of the Nation through guest lectures and a trip to the Monacan Museum and cultural center, and think critically about their voice(s) and narrative(s) in relationship to more dominant narratives both past and present. The class also will explore UVA’s relationship to the Monacan Nation over time, from Jefferson to today. We will consider how we, as individuals and as an institution, might build and maintain an ethically constructive relationship with a Nation that, despite colonization, discrimination, and efforts to silence its people, has maintained a powerful sense of community, culture, and identity.