Towards a Culture of
Belonging
― bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place
I did not come to research because I wanted answers. I came because there were things I couldn’t stop noticing—histories that pressed against my body before I had the language to hold them. Archives felt less like repositories and more like rooms with missing furniture. What I study followed me long before I chose it: across classrooms and streets, across kitchens, murals, and conversations where memory was passed hand to hand, often without permission.
My research is a practice of listening—to places shaped by colonial violence, to visual cultures rooted in collective care, to knowledge dismissed as informal, emotional, or excessive. I am interested in how art, particularly public and diasporic practices, makes place where none was meant to exist. My work refuses the idea that history is settled or neutral. It asks instead who has been asked to carry it, who has been written out of it, and what survives anyway.
Making is how I stay close to what scholarship cannot always hold. Through material, repetition, slowness, and improvisation, my artistic practice becomes another way of thinking—one that allows memory to move without being fully named. Art is where I work through what lingers, what resists clarity, what refuses to behave.
Teaching is where these ways of knowing meet. I approach the classroom as a shared site of inquiry, care, and unlearning—where students are invited to question authority, sit with contradiction, and recognize their lived experiences as knowledge. For me, pedagogy is a practice of freedom: a commitment to making space, building tables, and refusing inherited limits on who gets to speak, remember, and imagine otherwise.
I am becoming a person accountable to my communities, my students, and the histories that keep insisting on being heard.
To let go of
those titles—
those borders.
To just be.