The summer Brackenridge Fellowship has clarified what paths my research will take during my final year at Pitt. I’ve been able to focus and dedicate time to my work in a way that I would not be able to do if not for this funded summer opportunity. The weekly meetings were informative, and provided me structure without being too restrictive; this enabled me to experience what it might be like to conduct self-directed research with a cohort in the future. I’m extremely grateful to my co-mentors, Dr. Julie Beaulieu and Dr. Bridget Keown, who met with me every week, offering their time, wisdom, and resources to support how I might approach my subjects/collaborators and frame my project. Artistically and critically approaching personal archives is political and deeply personal—the care with which my mentors engaged in my written and video/audio work helped make the difficulties I encountered not only manageable but generative. Because of Dr. Beaulieu and Dr. Keown, I rarely felt alone when I felt lost or overwhelmed—each tangent, unexpected challenge, or frightening development became sites of potential, communication, and solidarity.

When it comes to the built-in Brackenridge cohorts and weekly meetings with my fellow scholars, I found that the opportunity to communicate research across disciplines has been one of the highlights of this summer. It’s one things to say you want your work to be accessible across audiences but putting such goals into practice fosters more dynamic and effective methods of communicating research findings. Terminology, for example, can become so familiar to those of us immersed in our respective schools of thought; this can be a challenge when our assumed familiarity with terms and concepts is projected onto others. Now that Brackenridge is coming to an end, I plan to continue developing this aspect of my work, leaning more deeply into considerations of translation; I’ll be doing my capstone this fall, and an independent study course in the spring (my last semester as an undergrad at Pitt) where I will have the opportunity to experiment with hierarchies of language in research practice. I can confirm that I absolutely love pursuing research that is personal and transformative, and I’m very excited for whatever opportunities may come from continuing my work.

Below is a screenshot of the most recent video work that I created for my project: