Posted Date: May 24, 2021
Episode Description: In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik has a conversation with Dr. Michele Prettyman on the intersection between academic and spiritual discourses. The episode explores certain political implications of excluding certain views of life and inhabiting the world. Dr. Prettyman advocates for spiritually animating inquiry as a part of our lives. This part of inquiry opens a space for discovery and imagination to engage with life’s bigger questions as a response to very few people outside of certain fields being invited to those conversations. The ways in which we process knowledge by excluding spirituality reveal the limitation of racism and white patriarchy. Dr. Prettyman offers her way of challenging and undoing those models with spiritual discourse. She interrogates how the category of “the human” is fraud and an incomplete category. Focusing on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, she positions spirituality as another dimension of human experience in navigating life amidst racial, social, and environmental pandemics to rethink systems and structures that center life beyond violence and exploitation.
Guest Biography
Michele Prettyman, Ph.D. is an affiliate faculty member in the Department of African and African American Studies at Fordham, a professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies, and a scholar of African American cinema, visual and popular culture, a screenwriter, and media consultant. She earned bachelor’s degrees in Radio/TV/Film and Afro-American Studies from the University of Maryland College Park and later received her master’s in Film, Video and Digital Imaging and a doctorate in Communication/Moving Image Studies from Georgia State University. Before entering academia, Michele began her career in documentary film/TV production working for National Geographic’s Explorer series and PBS specials. Over the years, Michele has taught courses in film studies and film history, African American cinema, global cinema, digital storytelling, race, gender and media, and screenwriting. She has become an important voice in the field of digital storytelling and received grants to train students in storytelling and social justice. Michele has published recent work in a range of academic publications including the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Lemonade Reader anthology, and for a number of online journals. In 2019 she co-edited and contributed to a “Close Up” series in Black Camera journal focusing on the “New York Scene” of black independent filmmakers which includes Kathleen Collins and Bill Gunn among others. Michele curates panels and events for film festivals and was named Artistic Director of the Tubman Museum’s inaugural film festival in 2019. She has also worked with the Macon and College Town film festivals. She is a co-founder of Daughters of Eve Media, a producer of film events, panel discussions and related content that has enjoyed a multiyear programming partnership with the pioneering American Black Film Festival (ABFF).
Project Title
“A New Earth?— Bridging Spiritual and Academic Spheres to Navigate the Racial, Viral and Environmental Pandemics”
OR
(How I Learned to Stop Being Afraid to Ask the Big Questions)
Project Description
This audio/podcast project explores life’s “big questions” and challenges by mining the intersection between spiritual and academic discourses. A second aim of the project is to curate broader and deeper conversations across communities not often in dialogue with one another: artists/scientists, elders/young people, religious/nonreligious teachers, folks inside and outside of the carceral state.
In this project, I share what I have learned as a student/teacher of spiritual and academic epistemologies and create space for others to share their insights. Ultimately, I hope to open a door to a deepened relationship to our shared universe with all its challenges and in all of its splendor.
This episode offers perspectives on how to navigate life amidst the viral, racial, and environmental pandemics which reached full manifestation this year. My approach would draw from a number of different spiritual, intellectual, and creative spaces including perspectives from figures like Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Howard Thurman, and Barbara Holmes alongside the work of scholars, writers, and poets, identifying practices and insights that crack open our cosmic, mental and spiritual literacies.
This talk (and my broader project) recognizes that our (human)frameworks and our approach for undoing and surviving these pandemics are in need of some repair. It promotes a more holistic conversation drawing from multiple sources which might give us tools to delve more deeply into the human being and asks, with urgency—who and how are we going to “be?”
Resources
1. Chopra, Deepak and Rudolph Tanzi. “The Planetary Biome: A New Theory of Life and Survival.”
2. Druyan, Ann. Cosmos: Possible Worlds. Washington D.C.: National Geographic, 2020.
3. Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Chico and Edinburgh, AK Press, 2020.
4. Ford, Clyde. The Hero With an African Face: Mythic Wisdom of Traditional Africa. New York: Bantam, 1999.
5. Harris, Melanie. Eco-womanism, Religion and Ecology. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2017.
6. Holmes, Barbara. Race and the Cosmos: An Invitation to View the World Differently. London: Bloomsbury, 2002.
7. Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred. New York: Bold Type Books, 2021.
8. Ryan, Judylyn. Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women’s Film and Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.
9. Tolle, Eckhart. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. New York: E.P. Dutton 2005.
10. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.