 Our next candidate is Michelle May Curry, who is a candidate in American culture. Michelle, please take the stage. Thank you all so much for being here. Dean Solomon, Dean Brammer, and Latasha and Paul, thanks so much for gathering us together. It feels really good to be together in community listening to everyone's really important work in this moment where we all feel kind of siloed and dispersed from each other. I am going to be sharing a little bit from my dissertation, which is tentatively titled and tentatively as in title literally changed this week, so we'll see how long this one sticks. It's titled Seams from the Cutting Room Floor, Black Motherhood and the Visual Politics of the Mixed Race Family. So over the course of the last century, visual culture has been a fraught entry point into discussions of mixed race families and their role in larger efforts towards racial and black political progress. While at times images of mixed race families are used to signify and justify political and social radicalism, at other times these images are used to uphold traditional gender roles and family structures in the name of social conservatism and keeping to the status quo. Most often these images are used to advocate for full citizenship, gender inclusion, and scientific and social equality on behalf of a collective black community despite black families and peoples having a range of diverging experiences with racialization that may not be fully captured by representations of solely mixed race families. What's more, previous discussions of mixed race families in the public and popular sphere have looked at how these visual politics play out in the context of white mother black father families without attending to the ways that black motherhood carries with it a particular history and politics of representation since enslavement. Mind dissertation then asks how black mother white father families are visually represented throughout the 20th and 21st centuries as a political and social symbol. In answering this question I use predominantly photographic archives to look at how public visions of mixed race families that uplift narratives of racial progress and social normativity are often accompanied by a second more private archive that reveals the personal effects of these representations on black mothers. The second archive of family images and narrative often show a different side of the family one that complicates easy associations of mixed race families with racial progress or political radicalism. So on this slide that you're looking at are two examples from my dissertation. On the left is a gallery still from my installation on the photographic representation of the loving family of the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case that overturned anti-interracial marriage laws. I make the argument that while photographs of the loving family in life and ebony magazines tell a story of a quiet apolitical family that wanted to just live and be left alone the unpublished images of the family from these photo shoots show how Mildred Loving who's the mother of the family how her home life was bound by deeply political considerations of safety and well-being. This installation was part of my work with the car center in Detroit which is a black arts organization I partnered with in 2019 to put on a series of exhibitions with early career black artists and scholars and multimedia artists carry meetings. The second image is of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio's mixed race family who he leveraged during his 2013 mayoral campaign as a symbol of progress and black radical politics. His wife Shirley McRae is interestingly a founding member of the Cumbia River Collective which was a black queer socialist feminist group who coined the language of identity politics. In this chapter and in a forthcoming article I have coming out in American quarterly I explore how the de Blasio campaign struggled with implications of McRae's queer identity and radical politics even as de Blasio's representation of his family relied upon the symbols of black radicalism to gain favor with minority voters. So I'd be happy to go into detail about any of this work later but I've been particularly interested in my time as a grad student at UM in the ways that I can engage in public scholarship in arts and humanities-based ways. So I'm really excited to join this group of scholars who I know are equally invested in these ideas. Thank you so much.