Other Work
Pillars of Our Work
Beautiful Facts
Facts are beautiful even if they deal with something gruesome because there is a beauty in their manufacture, there is something to marvel at in their construction. But there is something beautiful, in the more common and recognizable sense, in their horizon, in what the fact may contribute to or become.
- Of Beautiful Facts: Empirical Power and Compositional Elegance is an essay we are working on that examines different kinds of beautiful facts: poems, ethnographics facts, legal facts and shows how they are “beautiful”–empirically powerful, compositionally elegant, and oriented towards justice.
Annotating Landmark Legal Cases
We investigate the content and criteria of “dignity,” in two landmark cases: Tennessee v. Lane, a 2004 supreme court case dealing with access to courthouses by disabled people and Lobato v. Colorado, a 2013 state supreme court case dealing with the constitutionality of the state’s school financing system in light of its educational mandates. Our analytic focus was on the ways that dignity—as precept and concept, the term itself and its equivalent expressions, the “dignity interest” at the heart of litigation efforts—appears in the court record. The scope of our examination spanned the district, appellate, and Supreme court records.
Highlander Folk School Audio Archive
In 2016, we procured 50 analog cassettes from the Highlander Folk School Audio Collection (we were initially informed that digital recordings could be produced, but the cost was prohibitive). Administered by the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the Collection contains recordings of organization activities from 1953-1963. Accounting for 18 of the 25 hours on tape was a six-day 1962 voter education workshop.
- Audio recordings from the Collection allow us to document specific objective and subjective factors of educational experience: what people said, how they said it, what conceptual tools were used, and how meaning was constructed. They also present an opportunity to treat people’s words as a primary text in order to show how meaningful participation and educational dignity are accomplished in social interaction.One free ticket per special exhibition
Dignity & Social Interaction: Desegregation of the University of Alabama
Building on previous work on the social interactional study of dignity, we examine Robert Drew’s ‘Crisis,’ a cinéma vérité film produced in 1963 about the conflict between the Kennedy administration and Governor George Wallace over a federal court order to integrate the University of Alabama. We use use this documentary footage to show how the inter-personal experience of dignity—an historically contingent aspect of the inalienable and supreme value of the human person—was generated through the complex interaction between state and federal officials and the two citizens attempting to enter the university: Vivian Malone and James Hood. Additionally, as a way of informing the footage, we analyze interviews conducted with Malone and Hood, both African American, after enrollment to show how federal involvement and community solidarity worked to generate an enduring, albeit fraught, intra-personal sense of dignity.