Martine Granby

Familial Archives and a Black American Legacy of Care

Martine Granby (Assistant Professor, Journalism, UConn)

with a response by Richard Ashby Wilson (Law, Anthropolgy, and Human Rights, UConn)

Wednesday March 20, 2024, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Spanning decades of familial memories, TEN SECONDS OF SUGAR is a personal essay documentary film chronicling a legacy of caretaking, motherhood, and silence of Black women’s mental health. Reimagining the past as a form of trauma recovery, employing an essayistic approach illustrating the historical relationships between Black American women and the American health system.

SECONDS is a portrait disrupting generational divisions, seeking care, what it means to overcome structural inequalities, and what we pass down. Guided by my narrative voice, captured mainly by an analog tape recorder, the film presents a series of conversations between three generations of women: myself, my mother, and my maternal grandmother. The camera’s presence is a catalyst, paving the way for us to make space to speak openly and without judgment.

Through this talk, I’ll screen excerpts from work-in-progress scenes that render my family’s lineage of caretaking professions, nurses, mental health practitioners, and funeral directors as a form of care reformation and the accompanying research.

Martine Granby is a nonfiction filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Connecticut, focusing on documentary filmmaking with a joint appointment in the Africana Studies Institute and an affiliate of UConn’s Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She produces films that weave between documentary, experimental non-fiction, hybrid, and essay forms. Her creative research focuses on interrogations of and material experimentation with family and collective moving image archives, ethical considerations of found footage usage, and discourses around mental health in BIPOC communities.

Dr. Richard Ashby Wilson is Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Anthropology and Gladstein Chair of Human Rights. He is a scholar of transitional justice and his recent scholarship has focused on hate speech and incitement in international and U.S. law. His books include The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, Writing History in International Criminal Trials, and Incitement on Trial. He is a member of the Hate Crimes Advisory Council of Connecticut and he is writing a book about the challenges in reporting, investigating, and prosecuting bias-motivated crimes in the United States.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Middle of Somewhere: Place Attachment and the Geographies of Being

Alexander Diener (Professor of Geography, University of Kansas)

with a response by Martine Granby (Journalism, UConn)

Wednesday, October 18, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Place attachment is a burgeoning field of scholarship maturing in theory, method, and application. The phenomenon obviously relates to concepts of residency, including key questions such as: Who moves and why? Who stays and why? Who returns and why? But place attachment also encompasses broader networks of place and geographic contingency, including questions such as: How do place attachments form? Why do people form attachments to some places and not others? How are concepts of home and homeland negotiated within and across varied conditions of mobility? In this talk, Alexander Diener approaches place attachment as an assemblage of materiality, performance, and narration. Rather than being static or deterministic, this model points to people’s varied capacities to make and remake place attachments, and how this shapes everyday routines (e.g. routes to work, shopping, social interactions), major life choices (e.g. places of residence, education, vacations), and identities (e.g. civic, national, religious).

Alexander Diener is a Professor of Geography at the University of Kansas. His interests include borders, urban landscape, place attachment, axial development, migration, and diaspora. He possesses area studies expertise in Central Eurasia and Northeast Asia, having worked extensively in Russian borderlands. Alex has authored and edited nine books, most recently Borders: A Very Short Introduction (2023), The Power of Place in Place Attachment (2023), Invisible Borders: Geographies of Power, Mobility, and Belonging (2022), and Cities as Power: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity (2019). His work has been funded by the NSF, SSRC, IREX, AAG, and the MacArthur Foundation. He has held fellowships at the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center, the American University of Central Asia, Mongolia National University, George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, Harvard University’s Davis Center, and Fulbright’s Regional Research Scholar for Central Asia. At UCHI, Alex is writing The Middle of Somewhere, a book about the extensive but understudied effects of place attachment on the human condition.

Martine N. Granby is a nonfiction filmmaker, producer, and video journalist. She is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut, with a focus on documentary filmmaking. She holds a joint appointment in the Africana Studies Institute and is an affiliate of UConn’s Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. Granby produces films that weave between documentary, experimental non-fiction, hybrid, and essay forms. Her creative research focuses on interrogations of and material experimentation with family and collective moving image archives, ethical considerations of found footage usage, and discourses around mental health in BIPOC communities.