UB Faculty Research Grant Recipients

Project Proposal: Ecosystems of Care: Dance, Plants, and Poetry

Principal Investigator: Ariel Nereson, PhD

Proposal Narrative
Ecosystems of Care is a multi-year research project that activates “care” as a keyword at the intersection of performance studies, my home discipline, and the emerging interdisciplinary field of plant humanities. This project integrates theory and practice in its commitment to both scholarly research and creative research; thus, it also integrates what and how I know as a historian of movementbased performance and embodiment with what and how I know as a practicing choreographer.  

In this project, I ask, alongside my collaborator, dramaturg Dr. Jane Barnette (University of Kansas): how can encounters with plant life invite relationships to time that operate in registers counter to those of sociocultural and ecological hegemonies? We approach this question from our vantage in the performing arts, where the temporal pressures of production under neoliberalism often result in premiering new choreographic works with fewer than 24 hours of total rehearsal across 6-8 weeks. We are developing a book manuscript that will offer readers both a scholarly analysis and a creative workbook of tools that help us experience deceleration inside of these structures. We focus on “deceleration” as a possibly liberatory frame because neoliberal imperatives of speed, already obstacles to human flourishing, are heightened and thus particularly damaging in a generally ableist field like professional dance. Ecosystems of Care generates tools for working with plant time and poetic time as counter-time signatures to the production calendar. Both poetry and plants decelerate our attention: you cannot skim a poem with any fulfillment any more than you can will spring to come early. In our development of deceleration tools, we are guided by the Indigenous ecofeminist theory of interspecies and intraspecies reciprocal care, most popularly expressed in Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi)’s The Serviceberry. Through analysis of and reflection upon these tools, we demonstrate how sustainability ecologies, racial justice, and feminisms are co-constitutive of care-full pasts, presents, and futures.

In my project role as scholar-artist, I began by looking to artists for whom poetry and gardening or land stewardship were entwined creative practices. Because this project involves student designers and performers, I felt it was important to select artists whose work students could experience firsthand. UB Special Collections holds several important editions of the work of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) and Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) that students can directly interact with through sensory experiential learning. Dickinson and Clifton lived in vastly different times, faced distinct kinds of injustices, and produced aesthetically divergent work, yet they both found gardening to be generative of their art. Dickinson is perhaps the most well-known poet-gardener, and was an active participant in the horticultural trends that shaped gardening in the US for the last 150 years. Clifton is an important figure in Buffalo’s history, and her monument in downtown Buffalo is sited directly next to the native plant garden at the Central Library. By understanding how her poetic practice and land stewardship responded to racist property legislation, segregation, and resource allocation as well as gender discrimination in Buffalo, students and the publics who encounter the research (both scholarly and creative) can link environmental justice, racial justice, and reparative creativity as shared endeavors.

Both Dickinson, who lived in Amherst, MA, and Clifton, who grew up in Buffalo before spending a formative period in the Sonoran Desert, gardened with plants native to terrestrial biome 4 in what is now Buffalo, where the Haudenosaunee have cared for the land for millennia. This is significant for Ecosystems of Care because part of my research process is the development of garden labs for collaborators and students to work with firsthand. In alignment with reciprocal care as a research value, I only considered installing plants that would have benefits for native ecosystems and remedy biodiversity losses. Over the past eight months, I have used my current research funding to create a small-scale iteration of Dickinson’s garden on the land I steward in Buffalo as a research lab for developing choreography. Thus far, students have documented plant growth and senescence, and have brought 1 Ariel Nereson Ecosystems of Care Proposal plants into the studio to work with in improvisation scores. Planting a guild of native shrubs and perennials ensures that these initial expenditures result in (literally) perennial returns. In the second phase of this project, I will install a Clifton garden as well as steward a mini-Sonoran ecosystem indoors so that I (alongside students and professional collaborators) can better understand how disparate plant times – that is, the impact of the biodiversity of place – shape reciprocal care systems.

The third phase of this project shifts the timescale even further, moving from the time of production (hours) to the lifecycle of perennials and shrubs (months and years) to the lifecycle of the species Sequoioideae (centuries and millennia). This species, often referred to by their common name of redwoods, flips the script on our project and puts a single species at the center while developing a poetic constellation around it that bridges the time of Dickinson to the time of Clifton via an engagement with poetry by Walt Whitman and Joy Harjo (Muscogee). I shift from the land stewardship of gardening to the land stewardship of wilderness conservation; I also shift from making group work to developing Sequoioideae deceleration scores for solo professional practice that function as antidotes to the speed of life as a professional performing artist. Here I plan to generate a series of scores offered, in the spirit of reciprocal care, without charge to support the wellness of working artists in Buffalo and beyond.

Dr. Barnette and I have been collaborating on deceleration tools since June 2023 and are eager to pilot their relevance to the plant humanities and interdisciplinary concerns of care. Our scholarship and creative research position performance as a means of embodying the “species activity” of care, as theorized by Bernice Fisher and Joan C. Tronto. Throughout Ecosystems of Care, care is a theoretical area of inquiry but also a highly practical zone of endeavor: reciprocal caring with plant systems is aligned with reciprocal caring in artistic practice via a shared refusal of neoliberal imperatives of speed, and the assumptions of normative embodiment and white supremacy upon which these imperatives rely.

Anticipated Project Outcomes  
Public performances of creative research: Buffalo, NY (x2 – March 2026 and October 2026) and Lawrence, KS (November 2026)
Scholarly publications: co-authored chapter for edited collection (April 2026), sole-authored article for “Performing Wilderness” special issue (February 2027); book proposal for Wesleyan University Press, a leading academic publisher in dance and performance studies (December 2026)
Conference presentations: Mid-America Theatre Conference (March 2026) and Association for Theatre in Higher Education (August 2026)

Timeline for Completion 
December 2025: NYC site visit (Dickinson, Clifton, Sequoioideae); local site work (Dickinson)
January 2026: Boston and Amherst, MA site visits (Dickinson); begin UB rehearsals (Dickinson); begin drafting invited chapter (Dickinson)
February 2026: UB rehearsals (Dickinson); Sonoran desert site visit (Clifton); draft chapter (Dickinson)
March 2026: collaborator visit to UB and first public performance (Dickinson); invited research talk at the Mid-America Theatre Conference (Dickinson); draft chapter (Dickinson, Clifton)
April 2026: local site work (Clifton); Nereson visit to Lawrence, KS, for site work (Dickinson); Redwoods National Park site visit (Sequoioideae); submit chapter (Dickinson)
May 2026-July 2026: local site work and installation of Clifton garden (Clifton); workshop rehearsals and invited solo practices (Clifton, Sequoioideae)
August 2026: present research at Association for Theatre in Higher Education annual conference; prep rehearsals for Clifton in Buffalo and Dickinson in Lawrence (Dickinson, Clifton, Sequoioideae) 

Project Proposal: Access Intimacy in Buffalo’s East and West Side Neighborhoods

Co-Principal Investigators
    —Devonya Havis, PhD, UB Comparative Literature & Global Gender and Sexuality Studies
   —Andrea J. Pitts, PhD, UB Comparative Literature
    —Justin Read, PhD, UB Romance Languages 

Proposal Narrative
This proposal seeks to develop a pilot project to conduct oral history interviews with Black and Latinx community members in Buffalo, NY who are either receiving care or providing care within communities of color in the East Side and West Side neighborhoods of the city. A central focus of this pilot project will be affirming relations of “access intimacy” among community members who are interviewers and interviewees participating within the Communities of Care Project (hereafter referred to as “CoC Project”). Disability justice writer, educator and trainer Mia Mingus describes “access intimacy” in the following manner:

"Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs ... Sometimes it can happen with complete strangers, disabled or not, or sometimes it can be built over years. It could also be the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met. It is not dependent on someone having a political understanding of disability, ableism or access."*

Following Mingus’ description, this proposal seeks to affirm existing relationships among community members in the East Side and West Side neighborhoods of Buffalo with the goal of conducting oral history interviews that reflect or rely on forms of access intimacy. Access intimacy, as Mingus describes, builds on shared lived experiences, including experiences of disability, systemic ableism, patterns of racialization, systemic racism, gender relations, sexuality, heteronormativity, class conditions, conditions of scarcity, trauma, joy, language and communication, and other forms of shared experience. As such, we seek resources from the CoC Project to facilitate conversations and deepen relations of access intimacy among Black and Latinx interviewers and interviewees in the East and West Side neighborhoods of Buffalo to discuss how care shapes their lives. 

In particular, the proposal seeks funding to develop group sessions and community events at site-specific locations in the East and West Side neighborhoods that will seek out participants for the CoC Project with the aim of conducting at least 5-6 oral history interview sessions (with perhaps as many participants, although some participants may choose to participate in more than 1 interview session). Deepening and affirming access intimacy among Black and Latinx interviewers and interviewees in the CoC Project will also help facilitate, we hope, the sharing of stories in the oral history interviews that speak to the needs, desires, and values of Buffalo’s East and West Side communities. Locations/organizations for outreach include the following, which build on our already existing relationships in the city: the Belle Center, Frank E. Merriweather, Jr. Branch Library, Isaias Gonzalez-Soto Branch Library, Hamlin Park Community & Taxpayers Association, the Moot Center, Crane Library Branch, Harvest House, La Casa de los Taínos, Gloria J. Parks Community Community Center, Healthy Start, Delavan-Grider Community Center, Marks Homecare, the Locust Street Neighborhood Art Center, the Agustin “Pucho” Olivencia Community Center, Immersion East Side, PUSH Buffalo, Voice Buffalo, and the Partnership for the Public Good.

The detailed budget addresses the funding and resource allocation for the proposal, including the costs of translation for Spanish-language interviews.

Anticipated Project Outcomes
Oral history interviews completed: 5-6 recorded sessions
Transcripts: 5-6 transcripts
Spanish-English Translations: 3 English-language translations of transcripts

Timeline for Completion of the Work
●  Summer 2024: Following the hiring of the CoC Project Community Liaison, the Co-PIs will begin coordinating 5-6 interviews by hosting local events and participating in events hosted by community partners to facilitate interviewer-interviewee relationships.
●  Fall 2024 and Spring 2025: Facilitate interviews
●  Spring 2025: Hire a graduate student or community member with linguistic and cultural competency to review AI-generated transcribed Spanish-language interviews
●  Summer 2025: Hire a graduate student or community member with linguistic and cultural competency to translate Spanish-language transcripts to English (or to review AI-generated translations) 

* Mia Mingus, “Access Intimacy: The Missing Link,” Leaving Evidence Blog, May 5, 2011.

Histories of Care and Community: Restor(y)ing Residential Deaf and Blind Schools in the Jim Crow South

Jenifer L. Barclay, Department of History

            In Sounds Like Home, a rare memoir by a Black deaf southerner, Mary Herring Wright describes her childhood hearing loss and the grief she felt as a twelve-year-old leaving her hometown to attend the residential North Carolina School for the “Colored” Deaf and Blind in Raleigh. In denial about the looming start of school, Wright spent the summer of 1935 ignoring the letter and train ticket that came from Raleigh and the new clothes and suitcase her parents bought her. On the day of her departure, she ignored the reason her mother cooked and packed a feast of her favorite foods. When she dressed in a new outfit and said goodbye to her brothers, sister, and beloved dog, Queen, however, the tears began to flow. As her parents drove her to the train station, Wright “hurt and ached all over” watching her home fade from sight and the neighbors wave goodbye.^[1] At the station, she saw other children waiting to leave – her cousin, Norman, and his friend, Catherine, who were both blind, and an older girl, Margie, who was deaf. The constellation of people she recalled from that day attests to the deep significance of community and its relationship to care, both for Black southerners and disabled people in pre-Civil Rights era America.   

After the train departed for Raleigh, more children who knew Wright’s anguish all too well boarded at stops along the way. Comprising another community of care that grew larger as the school grew nearer, they comforted her as they took their seats in the segregated car reserved for them because they were both disabled and Black. They patted her shoulder, held her hand, made her laugh, and promised she would love the school. Wright’s heartache subsided, then welled again when she smelled the food her mother had sent. Her first weeks and months at the residential school repeated this roller coaster of emotions and memories, suspended between separate but overlapping communities. Homesickness ebbed and flowed, triggered by warm, sunny days that reminded her of playing outside with her siblings and her dog, then eased by the new community she found herself in that understood how deafness and blackness shaped her life. Wright’s classmates, teachers, and the matron of the deaf girls’ dormitory, Mrs. Mallette, consoled and cared for her as she navigated this painful process.

Wright’s discussion of her journey from home to residential school is only a single chapter of her memoir, yet it illuminates a range of individuals and a geography of care that stretched from the rural town of Iron Mine to the school’s urban campus in Raleigh a hundred miles away. Despite the importance of such first-hand accounts for shedding light on the dynamics of community, care, and survival for multiply-marginalized students in residential schools, very few exist. Of them, almost all focus on the lives of Black deaf students and ignore blind students.^[2] In this project, I hope to add critical narratives to this limited archive by conducting and recording oral and signed history interviews with former students and those in their family and community networks of support. A project of both restoring and re-storying, this work will add new dimensions to the history of blind and deaf education in the U.S. by contextualizing it within African American history and thinking expansively and historically about meanings and practices of “care,” particularly as they were shaped by the intersecting forces of race, gender, disability, class, and place.^[3]   

To summarize and clarify the outcomes of this project, I will conduct and record twenty interviews, each two hours in length, about the experiences of former students, their family members, and faculty/staff related to schools for blind and deaf students in the Jim Crow south. I hope to interview people who attended school in Washington, DC or Overlea, Maryland during and immediately after segregation, but this may change depending on the availability of participants. Video and audio recording will take place either in-person at Gallaudet’s Schuchman Center for Documentary History or over Zoom. Interviews with deaf former students will include Certified Deaf Interpreters (CDIs) familiar with Black American Sign Language (BASL). I will strive to gather an equal number of interviews with deaf and blind former students as well as siblings, friends, or remaining faculty/staff who can speak to networks of care within and beyond the schools themselves. Collectively, the interviews will document topics such as how students defined and understood “care,” how they cared for one another, what other caregivers they relied on (parents, siblings, neighbors, teachers, staff, church members), how they navigated tensions and overlap between communities of care at home and school, and times they lacked or faced barriers to care.

(The proposed timeline and budget included in proposal.)

            With the support of a $15,000 seed grant, I expect to produce video and/or audio recordings of twenty interviews by June 2025 that are professionally edited and include English transcriptions. These interviews will contribute to both the UB Communities of Care oral/signed history archive and my own research. They will serve as critical primary sources for my book project, Between Two Worlds: A Black Disability History of American Education from Emancipation to Integration, and essential experience to strengthen my pursuit of external funding from organizations like the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Spencer Foundation. Most importantly, however, the interviews will record the lived experiences of a generation of deaf and blind students of color who attended segregated residential schools in their youth before the chance to do so is lost. In addition to providing much-needed insights into the historical intersection of racism and ableism in American education, these histories teach us about the “poetics of survival” that emerge from this oppressive nexus and produce “vast networks of support” through which Black disabled lives “are enriched, enabled, and made possible.”[4]

[1] Mary Herring Wright, Sounds Like Home (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, orig. 1999, rpt. 2019), 83.

[2] For interviews with deaf former students, see Glenn B. Anderson, Still I Rise!: The Enduring Legacy of Black Deaf Arkansans Before and After Integration (Little Rock: Arkansas Association of the Deaf, Inc., 2006); Carolyn McCaskill, Ceil Lucas, Robert Bayley, and Joseph Hill, The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2011); and G. Jasper Conner, “Blind and Deaf Together: Cross-Disability Community at Virginia’s Residential School for Black Disabled Youth,” Disability Studies Quarterly 43 No. 1 (2023).

[3] African scholar Chinua Achebe suggested that “re-storying” is a form of resistance to a single story, when marginalized people re-tell dominant historical narratives from their perspective. It is a particularly apt term relative to Deaf history since many deaf people prefer the term “narrative” (signed “story”) over “oral” history. For decades, a campaign of oralism suppressed signed language and forced deaf people to speak so the word “oral” carries “powerful, often painful, connotations” for many deaf adults. See Jean Bergey and Zilvinas Paludnevicius, “Interviews in American Sign Language,” Journal of Folklore and Education 6 (2019), 23.

[4] Jina B. Kim, “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique” Lateral, Issue 6.1 (Spring 2017).