Project awarded funding Innovation Fund for New Ideas in the Humanities
Artist-in-Residence Sarah K. Khan created a digital contribution to the ArtHx project. In the illustration Curative Spaces: African Indian Ocean world femmes, Marjane and Uzza engage in the simple act of creating during the monsoon. They infuse their world with local food-medicine-essences like black pepper കുരുമുളക്, cinnamon दालचीनी, clove خکیم, rose گل ورد, and bitter orange البرتقال زهر ماء. Steeped in indigenous sciences, the femmes advance their dynamic, multisensory healing arts. Image courtesy of Sarah K. Khan
The Dean for Research Innovation Fund for New Ideas in the Humanities was awarded in 2022 to:
Art Hx: Visualizing the medical legacies of British colonialism
Anna Arabindan-Kesson, associate professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies
Anna Arabindan-Kesson, associate professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies will lead a team developing an educational online website that examines how British colonial attitudes permeated medicine, art and conceptions of race, both historically and today.
Through the site, the team will make available objects and narratives that explore three frameworks: cultivating care, medicalized space, and pathologies of difference. Cultivating care considers the meanings of care in historical study and analysis and in medical treatment. Medicalizing space explores how medicine has been used to interpret, categorize and circulate meanings about humans and their environment, and pathologies of difference probes how colonialism, medicine and art have facilitated constructions of racial difference, disease and health. Through contributions by project manager Jessica Womack, a graduate student in Art and Archaeology, graduate and undergraduate researchers, and invited artists scholars, the Art Hx team hopes to engender new ways of seeing how the past has shaped our present with the goal of inspiring material change.
The project was launched in 2021 with a two-year Collaborative Humanities grant from the Princeton University Humanities Council, which is the primary support for the project.