WORK 01

Community Engagement

In Houston, first generation South Asians navigate a culture of Southern anti-blackness with limited education about its historical context. At the same time, Black LGBTQ+ migrants in Texas face ongoing violence because of their race, gender and sexuality, along with numerous other obstacles to migration. I’ve been able to bridge these projects through creative digital humanities collaborations that center intersectional identity and migration. 

My public-facing scholarship in the humanities responds to immigrant community concerns around race and social justice in this global city that I call home and explores Houston’s engagement with the arts. I am connected to these communities as an educator, teaching South Asian and African first generations students in Texas, an art lover and a Houstonian.

My work in the public humanities is attentive to feminist methodologies, relationship-building, and the existing expertise of our diverse Houston-based team of collaborators. Community engagement requires that we expand our understanding of power dynamics, race, gender, sexuality, critical disability studies and anti-blackness in our communities.

WORK 02

Art Conversations

Fotofest
Creative Conversations/digital:
Francis Almendárez and Kara Springer with Rachel Afi Quinn 
3/10/21

Archives April 14, 2022

Diverse Works – Open Dance Project
Roundtable Discussion: Power, Sex & Climate Change
1/30/21

DiverseWorks and Open Dance Project collaborated for a virtual roundtable discussion on the intersecting themes of power, sexuality, and climate change explored in ODP’s new immersive dance, All the Devils are Here: A Tempest in the Galapagos. 

This discussion is part of a series of public programs that engage audiences with ODP’s research and creative process in the lead-up to the premiere of All the Devils are Here in May 2021. 

Annie Arnoult, Open Dance Project Artist Director, was be joined by GUEST SPEAKERS Rachel Afi Quinn, Assistant Professor, Comparative Cultural Studies and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of Houston Lina Dib, Multidisciplinary Artist Ryan McGettigan, Scenic Designer, Open Dance Project 

MODERATED BY Niki Kasumi Clements, Assistant Professor of Religion and Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities, Rice University This event is supported in part by the National Performance Network, Cullen Trust for Performing Arts, City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, Texas Commission on the Arts, Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston Endowment, and the John Steven Kellett Foundation.

WORK 03

Black.Migration.
Houston.

As a digital humanities pedagogies project and working group, Black.Migration.Houston (B.M.H.). aims to be responsive to the needs, concerns and specificities of Black LGBTQIA+ migrants in the US South. Black LGBTQ+ migrants worldwide are impacted by structures of power that produce anti-black policies, forced migration, military occupations, homophobic/transphobic violence, wealth theft, economic precarity, lack of legal status for citizenship, environmental racism and more.

B.M.H is a collaborative effort that seeks to build networks, inform research, produce data, and share resources that might directly impact the lives of Black LGBTQ+ migrants to the Gulf Coast Region. With this project I brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and community members, interested in learning together and developing a public humanities project through which to share information and resources about structural inequity at the intersections of blackness, migration and sexuality.

In Houston, Texas, B.M.H. supports the efforts of the national organization Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project (BLMP) both locally and nationally, as well as other organizations serving migrants in the region.

WORK 04

Imagining America
@ UH

At University of Houston I have spearheaded Imagining America @ UH, a faculty working group and community conversation about doing public scholarship, supported by the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Work, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program and the Center for Art and Social Engagement at University of Houston.

Throughout my graduate education, the national organization Imagining America influenced my development as a community-engaged scholar and I worked to initiate a university-wide membership for UH so that students could participate in funding opportunities and faculty could connect with other scholars to learn best practices for community engaged scholarship. 

Key desired outcomes of this project include bridging the university and community divide, sharing resources at our public university with community members, collaborating with other social justice-minded scholars, creating opportunities for mentorship, and ongoing interdisciplinary learning among participating professors, students, and community members.

WORK 05

South Asian Youth in Houston Unite (SAYHU)

I am one of seven co-founding members of SAYHU, a transnational feminist collective that aimed to empower young South Asian Houstonians by creating spaces where they could engage with, learn, and effectively respond to complex social issues that impact their lives.

For five years, SAYHU worked collaboratively to provide an annual Summer Institute for South Asian youth and regular community gatherings across Houston, produced a digital archive of our work, and hosted a regional summit at Art League in 2018. SAYHU served as a space of feminist mentorship and education, collaboration and the democratization of knowledge. Over the years, SAYHU received annual financial support from the Simmons Foundation for the extensive programming we provided in person and online.

Community resources, SAYHU’s summer institute curriculum, educational materials and tips on hosting your own community gathering among South Asians in Houston and Texas more broadly and organizing around issues of social justice are published on the SAYHU website: www.sayhu.org. For more on SAYHU’s digital humanities project, the SAYHU Preservation Project, go to www.sayhupreservation.org.

I also established and supported students in curating the SAYHU blog where community members could publish their stories. I contributed the following two essays that illustrate some of the specific work of SAYHU’s project:

Challenging Anti-Blackness in the South Asian Community: A Conversation, August 2019
Feminist Community-Building in the Time of Covid-19, April 2020