 Thank you Good afternoon everyone, I apologize for the Philadelphia weather. I think our request for good weather is in God's junk mailbox It's my pleasure to Moderate the panel on institutionalization and interdisciplinarity Where do we locate the visual and the performative when they within the Academy and And we are joined today by a distinguished panel We have Diana Taylor from Hemi at NYU Elmo Terry Morgan from rights and reason theater at Brown University On the screen we have Faye Ginsburg the Center for Media History and Culture at NYU and then Annalise Riles anthropology and law from Cornell So welcome to all of you and I'm gonna be Ruthless about the time to keep us on schedule But I'm looking forward to our conversation. So we'll start with So hi everyone, so thank you so much to Deborah She's and Regina and others for organizing this morning's discussion was just fantastic and really exciting to me so So I I'm an anthropologist Who has been working mainly with lawyers and with Technocratic institutions of various kinds throughout my career and so you may wonder what is my connection to all of this and It is that I'm now at this point in my career interested in doing something a little bit different. I'm interested in actually so the performativity that I want to bring to the table here is performing the ethnographic and the technocratic modalities of thought and practice in themselves as a kind of exercise and and and where the purpose is for doing so might remain very open and thinking about how those two might speak to each other and I think of this as a Project that's really inspired by feminist theory and feminist anthropology. I've trained in feminist anthropology and one of the I think basic insights of feminist anthropology has always been that there's a Tremendous excess beyond the text that comes out at the end of the ethnography that that the very reasons for which one Entered into the field and what the field meant to us retro is often retrospectively Somehow not quite there in the text and so just over lunch. I had several conversations where I heard somebody say Well, this is really interesting to me, but it doesn't show up in my book You know so that kind of idea is what I'm talking about and and I think one of the really important pieces there for Feminists was always the relations themselves and valuing them in those in themselves if you like as a kind of dare We say ethical commitment of a kind And and in particular the way those relationships engender a process of self transformation or maybe reorientation entailed in specifically in the act of Becoming interested in and then maybe even empathetic to foreign this however that foreign this may be conceived You know today. We were just doing our little exercise for the next hour We've walked into the gallery and picked an object and tried to become empathetic towards that object And I think that kind of reorientation is just fundamental to Ethnography so so when I when I speak about ethnography what I'm specifically talking about is a kind of risk-taking Practice it is risky, you know even humiliating right Into in which there's also a dimension of incomprehensibility and confusion caused by the very excess of the field that things don't come at you and me categories and there's all this stuff going on and that through that process certain kinds of incongruent connections emerge that are ultimately self transformative for the ethnographer So that's the ethnographic piece and then I'm also interested in performing what I think of as the technocratic So this is what my Informance the people he's calling for men's do right the lawyers the bureaucrats that I work with and for them One of the main tools of thought is what's called means ends reasoning so in almost every field thinking instrumentally And it sounds very dry But what's fast what's always fascinated me about all the technocrats that I've ever worked with is that there is an Access to means ends reasoning to that is that the means Often overtake the ends or the means come to foreground get foregrounded and the ends get back on it So a lawyer might say to you I work, you know, why do I work for Goldman Sachs? I work for Goldman Sachs to pay my college kids college tuition tuition But let me tell you about this really cool thing I invented right so the way in which the thing the tools themselves overtake the ends in in daily life the excess of the means over the ends and so I got interested in instrumentalism itself as a kind of controlled fiction or practice or that is performed and how that might be in conversation with ethnography, so So I guess the connection to the larger conversation we're having here what I felt really like I wanted to cheer about this morning was the idea can ethnography take some other form then as a prelude to a text and But then the the question that was also raised on the panel this morning that once one does that one produces Genres that are not recognizable as such that is they don't necessarily sound like serious projects and And what I want to suggest here in response to that thought that maybe which I think with the point of this panel Let's talk about what to do about the fact that we're not taken seriously is that I think that that itself can be a Tremendous ethnographic opportunity that it's similar to the process of Submission that you go through as an ethnographer in any field situation, which is not being taken seriously I was tell my you know and and and in a sense the abeyance of our own expertise our expert agency can be quite productive And I also think of that as very feminist point I was tell my you know, I'm always asking how can you do fieldwork in Japan with central bankers when they don't take women? Seriously, and you were really young when you do the ethnography and must have been horrible Yeah, it's horrible not being taken seriously, but it's a tremendously fabulous ethnographic tool right because the people who do take you seriously are incredible people, right and and and and so there's actually Incredible value. I think in that situation of discomfort So, but I guess the difference from perhaps what we talked about this morning is that for me what what ethnography the form that ethnography is taking is not so much a film or a Play or anything like that. It's a global institution. What I'm interested in is what what if ethnography could be something completely different What if it could be an alternative to the university? What if it could take some totally other form? Okay, so the project that I'm involved in now is called meridian 180 and its origins date to the very end of a tenure ethnographic project that I did in Japan and Also an earthquake, you know, there was an earthquake in Japan in 2011. It was a very very difficult time for anyone who lived through that professionally personally and just about every existentially at every level a nuclear crisis and and I I along with my Informance of 10 years experienced An absolute shattering of intellectual confidence. The question was why have we not thought about this? Why didn't we know this was could happen? Why did we not think about energy? You know all these things. Why was I not interested back to this issue of interest? Why? Why why why was this not on any of our radar screens, right? and and this sounds perhaps You know facile, but You know just talk about that in the abstract But for the people who I worked with who were experts whose job was to manage the global economy to manage the state This was so severe that you know it really Became a point of you know, I mean one person called me and said you won't see me again Because I'm going to drink myself to death this weekend. You know, there was a sense that there is nowhere to go and and At that point we began to I began to ask myself What does ethnography have to offer in these kinds of dark moments when you really are facing the limits of your own expertise? You are as an ethnographer and they are as subjects And and I began to think that perhaps we could have some kind of an ethnographic form of engagement Which whose purpose was simply frankly to allow us to live side by side the limits of our own thoughts and our own our own tools um this project has grown since the earthquake into um A uh, I guess you would call it an institution. We have 700 members Two-thirds are academics one third are policy makers lawyers practitioners The academics are predominantly lawyers, but and anthropologists and then finance people And then we have sts gender studies just about everything else theologians artists all kinds of people 29 countries, but predominantly asia-pacific rim and the conversation takes place in four languages always so the linguistic dimension I think is also very important to me as an ethnographer the The the process of thinking through a question in multiple languages um and um We I could talk more about the governance if that's of interest to people, but I think I will not now but but But our format is to have uh online and live conversations in which We choose topics about which we feel there's a limit to our own Our own ability to even think the questions and then we ask People to do something with those questions, which seems familiar to them at first But turns out not to be so we ask them to attend a conference. We ask them to make comments online But then we deny them a lot of the expert Tools for doing that so no footnotes very short comments. You won't get any publicity out of this. You can't use your name You can't benefit from it. We're not going to put them on a website And you can't put it on your resume and we do we do everything we can to try to make take away the the uh The idea that there could be an output of some value to you in doing this, right? So it's like we're performing our expertise. We're performing the means without any possible ends for doing it um And the style of the conversation is cerebral and very intense and risk taking we ask people to deal with questions that are outside their disciplinary focus Um, but so it's very different from other online things that you might imagine like blogs or things like that, but It doesn't have a lot of the the trappings or benefits of of academic work Now, um, one of the questions that the panel raised what the panel question Of abstract ways was what are the methodological and what are the theoretical states and For me methodologically, um, it comes out of the study the ethnographic study of experts and in my case lawyers but I think a lot of the Ethnography of the contemporary now faces a similar problem Which is the language and and knowledge practices that the the pathways the genres the tools of ethnographic of Of one's subjects of the world are imperceptibly close to our own as ethnographers and absolutely Intertwined with them. This is I think what the term para ethnography is trying to get at And it creates this pitfall, which I see a lot of my graduate students face, which is that We what we used to call in the old days the confusion of emic and edict, right? That there's you're not really sure whether it's your categories or their categories that you're dealing with anymore um, and um and Our thought is to take that to the next step as performance by saying We're actually going to allow these things to merge into each other We're going to enter into a space in which that divide between the informant and the anthropologist just doesn't exist anymore And we're actually making concepts Together, we're going to knowingly merge these things knowing that that's actually quite problematic in itself um, and now, um Theoretically or politically, I think this is significant um for for several reasons. Um In the world that I inhabit as a law professor The dominant modality of thought is or or self self identity as a as a law professor or As a legal academic as is that you imagine yourself as a kind of expert advisor to the king, right? You're the person who provides advice You have some deep knowledge about something and the the regulators or whoever the judges should listen to you And you should tell them what to do And as an ethnographer that just seems like a totally crazy thing to me to do But it's a modality that I must inhabit in order to be in that position Um, and so I've always sounded quite interesting to be in a space that I find just totally impossible in that way But what's interesting at this moment is that the very the contradictions are weighing down so heavily on that role Among the experts themselves that they too are starting to feel that it's crumbling and they're not quite sure what to do Now on the flip side on the anthropologist side I think the anthropologists imagine often that their role is to be the anarchist critic, right? So to stand on the outside and throw bombs or whatever and That also is a role that I always find somewhat problematic to inhabit because I live also on the other side and you know And I think it's there's a That is also a role which now is finding itself weighing down with so many contradictions So many internal tensions that it becomes difficult to bear And so then the question becomes What is left for us as a subject position and as a modality of action After either expert knowledge and the modality of advisor the king or critique, right? What comes next? That we need some other modality of engagement some other way to go forward And it seems to me that the only way that that's going to come to be is through some sort of performative space in which We and they Meet in a mutual acknowledgement of the dark side the limits of our techniques and tools and that's what Fukushima was for me so So then the last question that the the panel organizers asked us to address is how to translate all of this into Concrete institutional support. I think was the question, right? So how to make this all somehow Doable and and I guess my response to that is you know, again I've had a career of for 20 years being both a law professor and an anthropologist are running back and forth I mean, it's almost hilarious the first first job that I had I gave job talks in both departments on the same day and I was literally changing outfits as I was running from one department to the other like taking off the suit putting on the Ethnic scarf while I was dragging So So, um, yeah, two minutes guys So so um and my response to that has always been that there's tremendous power in The kind of letting people have a creative misunderstanding of what one is doing And to me that's part of what I heard in the talk about performance today that the performance space is a space in which Creative misunderstandings can be celebrated and used in some way And so my response to the institutional question is again to allow for a kind of I guess this is my sort of career theory piece but a kind of Creative misunderstanding a misunderstanding that is plausible But ultimately in some ways flawed and let that Also be out there as a kind of experiment. So My dean imagines that what I'm doing is building a new global institution, right? You know, I mean and that's plausible Understand there are 700 people from 30 countries in this group. So yeah, right so Whatever now the problem is that there will be points at which the tensions become Really apparent and impossible to to maintain anymore And I've found that foundations are really good at sniffing out what's really going on They don't believe this for a second, right? So and so the phrase that we often get back to grant proposals is you're neither fish nor fowl I just love that phrase you're neither fish nor fowl So Because you're mixing too many things you've got to which I to me is what ethnography is It's neither fish or fowl You're in the field and things are coming at you from all these directions and That we're trying to recreate that so it looks unclear It doesn't look like a real institution and that's challenging and difficult, but I know you want me to stop so I will So But what I have found is that whereas foundations don't buy it The members themselves the people who are part of the performance Find tremendous value in it and it is they who are moved and changed by this experience and is they Who have who actually are willing to mobilize whatever resources they can to make things happen So I think maybe one response to the to the the question of how to Deal with the institutions is to say We are right here in the we are the institution and and we have the ability to make things happen if we understand what it is and that's that's That's how we've survived as a project Um I think i'll just close by saying that I think the ultimate question for for this project is for me the this A version of this institutional question, which is How does something how is interest in something foreign or unfamiliar ultimately generated and how does that interest in How does my interest in you And the things about you that I don't understand come to change me And I think that's the basic humanist project, which is a core of anthropology for me And it's the piece that it and the challenge of getting institutions to hear these projects It's just another version of the work of doing that question itself And so we shouldn't think of the institutional question as a side question or something that's Uh, something you have to do to get on with the creative work. It is the creative work itself Thank you next Thank you. Um, would you just remind me what the time frame this help? 15 minutes 15 minutes. Okay, great. Um, so, uh, hi everyone. Sorry. I can't be there. Um, I I have to be in new york is my daughter's medical status, but I also have a horrible cold So you're probably happy. I'm not there sneezing on you Anyway, uh, I very much appreciate the invitation and the conference is uh, willing this to Insert me in through this skype Um, and especially did uh deb and john and gabriel for all their guidance for this Looks like a wonderful crowd I'm getting some feedback. Are you hearing it? Delighted to be on the panel addressing institutionalization and interdisciplinarity and the Visual and the performative within the academy. Um, I'm sorry. I can't be as fluidly connecting up to what happened prior To this since I wasn't there, but hopefully it'll it'll mesh So I'm gonna talk about I'm assuming this is what you want me to talk about something I've been working on for almost three decades, which is um, the graduate certificate program and culture and media at NYU that I started here Uh, 28 years ago when I was 10 years old just kidding And but it was right after I got my phd and I was invited that the time by um, the chair of anthropology and net wiener And uh, also the chair of cinema studies brian winston and people know he have a very distinguished scholar of documentary as well as a director of those things And they were both really interested in ethnographic film and they wanted to try and work together to start a program and they About me because I was in new york and I was doing a lot of work with film People anyway, I sort of got in front of their vision and um asked me to start it They really didn't know what they wanted to do that's kind of an institutional advantage Two things they didn't really they weren't sure and also they didn't have very much money So it was really great because then someone very junior like I was at the time um could step into that and the expectations were kind of Not clear since they really weren't sure what they were doing, but I had a lot of ideas. So It was really a wonderful opportunity Um, it was a period in the 80s. It was in the late 80s When the anxieties of influence around anthropology and other modes of expert knowledge and also critiques of the colonial camera were very prevalent so I asked them if I could avoid the patronizing connotations of a title like ethnographic film And what I saw is the problems of the segregation of the field of visual anthropology Which when it was attached to other academic departments tended to be its own little ghetto Um, and I was also concerned that we'd not think about media as only being visual. So That's how we ended up with the name culture and media which is about as big as you can get I guess To date now over 180 people have successfully completed the program They come either through the graduate program in anthropology Those are all phd students or in cinema studies For our phd and master students And then we have a few sneaking in from programs like media culture and communication and some other fields Anyway about 180 people have done these uh done the program which means that they have um Learned the critical history of cross cultural filmmaking over the last century They have been to the very present to develop sophistication in the ethnographic study of media across the globe And these range from The study of video projects in the amazon to bollywood film industries to Mouty television my puchet use of social media cell phone films in arnhem land quite a wide range what um We call here media worlds It's the name of the book that my former colleague at NYU lila bullagad and at that time our student brian larkin who's now also Barnard Used as the title for our edited collection which was an effort to kind of plant the flag over um On the field and to say in fact, anthropology needs to be looking at media We need to be using much more ethnographic kind of approach to looking at it There's so much stuff that falls off the radio radar of what? The dominant media industries imagine to be media things have really changed very very rapidly But at the time when we were putting that book together, which was in the early 21st century Those were not so obvious So they very much characterize the kind of approach that we take here in terms of research Find the everyone in our program Excuse me And as I mentioned, they're all graduate students in anthropology or cinema studies Also makes a documentary film their last year of course work Our production course pushes them to be very strong on story as strong as they are on technique and also with a collaborative approach And a self-conscious Concern with both the excellence of their work and the ethics of it as well Thinking about we used to call the politics of representation distinguishing the work that comes out of our program The first audience that their work reaches Will usually be many of the people who are in their films And I always feel like that's one of the most important ways to keep people honest and one of the ways that Introducing the visual and that kind of practice into the academy Um, you know plays a very important role It's very different to write about people when they're at a great distance from you and they're reading what you write And of course that's increasingly changing, but it's really particularly Compelling and keeps you very honest to know people are going to be sitting there watching the representations that you make of them Um, additionally, and I don't know how many of you are out there are familiar with other visual anthropology programs. Excuse me We don't have a house style that marks the films that get made in some of the other programs So for example in Manchester, they're well known for the observational approach Or in harbour, they've um kind of branded their orthodoxy that they call sensory ethnography Um, and we really take a very different approach So in the very first seminar students become familiar with the range of styles and techniques that have been used over the last century And the paradigmatic works that define the field And are made aware of uh, we one of the ways that indigenous media got introduced into our program very early on was Just to be sure that students recognize that Um, everybody can hold the camera now They may not want you to come in and make representations to really be very mindful of the appropriateness of walking into a space with a camera And what that might mean and maybe that's not the way you should be approaching it Uh, excuse me for one second. I'm just feeling the effects of my cold medicine. I just have to get some water for me Okay Okay, um Okay, um In addition, we are very fortunate to be in New York City Because we take advantage of all the Lively and creative institutional surround beyond the university So all of our students work and they're very first semester on the market read film festival Um, so they're immersed in a range of recent work and meeting contemporary filmmakers I work as one of the curators on the festival every year. So we are increasingly doing installation work We have introduced us at three years ago sessions that we call culture labs where we're looking at how People are working on and off screen with all the different kinds of media practices So there's just a lively sense of being inserted into a world beyond the academy Uh, and looking at the kinds of experiments that people are doing these days Um, let's see right want to go So I just was going to mention like some of the kinds of films that students make, um Enter into their research practice at all. In fact, a number of them have started calling Uh, the film project a kind of passport into their into field work I'll just mention a few um, some of them. I know have shown in the philadelphia area Um, Teresa Montoya's film doing the sheep good is a beautiful reflexive account of her efforts to bring Um films made by novice navajo filmmakers in the 1960s with the famous saw worth experiments Brought those back to the original filmmakers in pine springs The films have basically disappeared from the navajo reservation Um, and the film is a wonderful chronicle of her Journey back there bringing the films back meeting some of the filmmakers and discovering her own kinship relations with people That's just kind of a meditation on the transformation of Uh, and responsibilities of carrying a camera. Um, natasha raheja's film made in india, which, um She premiered last year at the margaret meat film festival follows the journey of Matt hulk covers on new york streets that are stamped with the phrase made in india She got the idea for her film walking across the street when she looked on and said why is this they made in india? And she actually tracked down the factories in india and hung out with um, the The people making those manhole covers for about a month during january made a really remarkable film that like the kind of I follow the thing film Um, and another one just i'll mention these three, uh christy melodics Film living ketchwa is a portrait of alba ambia a new york-based ketchwa speaker who single-handedly Cultivated ketchwa speaking communities in new york city um a project that grew out of um christy's ketchwa podcast series that she makes with some Some other ketchwa students in the city going around and discovering who's speaking ketchwa reporting their stories and making them available So, um, finally our students have become positively evangelical. Is there now in positions throughout the us and beyond as academics filmmakers and cultural activists? Um, we're a program if we're we're old enough to have a couple of generations out there at least So there are places like harvard berkeley chicago ervine barnard barnard. I could just along with Tuffs others. Anyway, i'm now competing with my former students for A graduate students, which is kind of a nice feeling But they're they are um also setting up similar kinds of programs that cross over between media anthropology both in terms of production and research Um Hold on. I'm just looking at my notes here. So, um I wanted to mention a few things just about what my you know, what kind of provoked me into doing this and I had I had worked in uh documentary before I started graduate school and I had the opportunity to study with a french anthropologist and filmmakers enrush. I don't know people are familiar with him Okay, and um, I see some heads nodding. And so I'm some of you know Anyway, he was a very wild and woolly guy and very uh inspiring teacher But most importantly what I really learned from him Was the way the film can open up the possibility of what he would call anthropology protégé or shared anthropology And this was again in the 50s. So actually it's interesting because uh, some of the things on elise was talking about as, um Ethnography's excess I think were the things he was trying to think about but also to think about how Um, something beyond sort of written academic texts can be an opportunity for Jointly shaping representations. I'm so sorry. I couldn't hear what I heard a big noise, but I don't know what that was Okay um So the um, you know, I think that that the question of being able to capture some of the kinds of um Parts of ethnography that you really can't be captured in the text and to have that opportunity to really Work together with people on a joint project of representation is sometimes this is touted as a very new thing It's not such a new thing, but it hasn't really been engaged as fully as I think it could be So it's one of those things we really, uh, try and think about in our program um Um, I really cut I appreciated it very much when I was actually did my very first fieldwork project In Fargo, North Dakota with women on both sides of the abortion debate And also felt the the passport question because I think if I come into that community First as an anthropologist, no one would have talked to me. Um, who's this person from new york? Why should I spend time with them? You know, maybe you're sure they don't understand what we do, but when I came in with a camera Um, and offered them the opportunity to be involved in their own representation. I was very Uh, I was welcomed into places that I think I would not have been welcomed into otherwise um Additionally, I was working for at that time for a television station. So though in the when the documentary screened about their lives, I was Um, really, uh in the hot seat because I knew if they didn't like the film I couldn't go back and complete research there, but fortunately people were Uh comfortable with their own the complex representations of women on both sides of the debate there And it also captured the feeling of the place that's hard to get across in an ethnography like watching people Protest in front of a clinic and when it's 20 below zero for weeks on end and things like that So, um, how am I doing on time? Sorry, two minutes. I have two minutes. Okay great because I'm just gonna I hope I'm touching the kinds of points that people are interested in hearing. Um Hold on one second. I guess what I want to say is we've been in terms of institutional support. Um I've been very fortunate because there's been a lot of interest this program was Was something that helped distinguish NYU's anthropology program from other Places and so the various, um Chairs that we've had have been very tolerant of it I've also gone after foundation money to help amplify and build the program in 1993 I got Rockefeller money to start the center for media culture and history And that allowed us to bring in really lively and interesting fellows who stretch the boundary of the academy to activists and Artists and a range of people who Who, you know, it really brought a very creative kind of sensibility to the work But also gave us support for a lot of public programming that would Stretch the range of work students could be exposed to in 2003 we Received we were actually invited by Pew Charitable Trust to start a center for religion and media Which is ongoing and so that's a bit a whole new research Initiative we've had fellows we've had working groups from that range from Things like human rights, um indigenous cosmologies Christianity is a whole in a whole range of different kinds of projects and many of those have helped launch student projects. Um In 2005 we did a big project with the museum of american indian and moma called first nations first features where we brought 20 indigenous filmmakers from all over the world to show their first feature film Um and that very much emerged out of work that I had been I've been doing for a number of years but um each filmmaker who came had a grad student attached to them to keep the to sort of You know mind help mind them help look after people when they're in the city for the first time And I think we got five phd projects resulted out of those relationships because people got to have that first opening But it also helped introduce that work and put it on the map of Important film work in this in the city um Finally work i'm currently doing which is very involved in looking at um the transformation of disability since the ada the last 25 years Uh, we're doing we're looking at i'm working with a partner and we're looking at sites of innovation And one of those is of course media so i've helped actually in doing the research I call this method the mobius strip because it's kind of hard to know where the inside and the outside are You know the figure of the mobius strip. There's no insider outside Um, so I started talking to people about films and before I knew it. I was helping start a film festival We just finished our seventh iteration of that It's called real abilities and my u is an off-site Screening center for that But we've actually developed 37 sites throughout the city to into these are works by for and about people with disabilities um the second to the last night we actually showed a film about um disability activism in immersive worlds and we had um a discussion that took place both in the audience and um With 40 avatars gathered in second life to amplify that discussion in cyberspace. So that's it's been a kind of fun Way that we're extending into digital worlds. So I think i'm kind of running out of time here But anyway, which we we just keep um trying to expand the range as the ways we think about media, you know back When we started almost 30 years ago And we did seem like a radical thing to include media and anthropology. It doesn't seem so radical anymore. In fact, it seems very necessary um So fortunately, we've had um, you know a lot of we've had a lot of support for the work that our students are doing And a lot of support for the range that of stuff that we're you know, we do have to go after foundation money and other forms of support We collaborate a lot on diana taylor. Who's there somewhere? Uh, and I collaborate on support mutual projects the disability project is something that's on her radar radar as well at the hemispheric institute so um, I hope that covers the ground that you wanted to hear about And I look forward to hearing the rest of you Thank you Well, hello, and thank you and thanks to deb and gave and other people who Made this possible. I'm going to talk about three kinds of moments In my career in terms of discipline disciplinary, uh kind of Breaking for me into a different area and the first was getting into performance studies I know that some of you uh, e patrick. I don't know who else is in the performance studies department But um for those of you who are you know that, uh, it's very difficult to pinpoint performance studies down I think of it as a post discipline. I think of it as um set of Methodologies and critical ways of applying critical lenses that come out of a whole slew of Disciplines but is not in and of itself a discipline So that for me is incredibly exciting to be able to break into This other area that has in my Uh, experience freed me of the disciplinary boundaries Uh within which I was trained and that's great. I mean, I it's not I don't like disciplines But I like this sway of being able to think about more complex objects of analysis and to pull from all sorts of different places Being a post disciplinary or whatever performance studies is Is a challenge in institutional ways performance studies at nyu was the first performance studies department and what happened there As the story goes was that some of the faculty from The graduate school of the drama department Went up to talk to the dean and said listen, we don't do drama anymore We do this thing that we think of as performance studies We would like to have our own department and the dean then said great Why don't you have your own department and you'll be a graduate department and Drama will be undergraduate and that's perfect Well, that was completely perfect except that as everybody in the world knows you don't fund a graduate department without an undergraduate And there has been a big brouhaha Since the day performance studies got started because there was no funding source for it so um When I went into performance studies in 97 I went in as chair And part of my part of my project was to try to figure out how to make this self-sustaining And I spent years, you know trying to convince the dean of different things we could do None of which helped now Of course the inevitable has happened, which means that we are now starting this next year our first undergraduate class So some 35 years after the founding of performance studies We have to go back and start an undergraduate class in performance in performance studies So it's going to be exciting and I'm very happy about it, but um being a post disciplinary Department poses all sorts of other kinds of problems that we can talk about challenges. I prefer to call them But like for example, we don't have a canon Right, what do you read? What's your exam list? Who's on it? Right? Well, it depends how you think about performance studies And there's lots of different ways of doing that So the second thing I want to talk about is the ones in performance studies in when I got there in 97 um, I Thought that the conversation about performance studies not just the critical theory in general was very Anglo That is it was written in English And it was written basically in the us the uk and australia All fabulous work, but I thought it was very be very important to open up the conversation north south And to actually involve people From latin america the us in canada i'm from mexico for for me. There was a huge political Ethical and whatever investment epistemic investment in trying to get these different ways of thinking about all sorts of embodied practices into some kind of conversation together And I started the hemispheric institute of performance and politics in 1998. So the year after I got to NYU Now hemi as we now call it is I don't know 17 years later a very large project and it's basically a network of 45 universities from throughout the americas and about 25 cultural centers and we work together in all sorts of different ways and consider ourselves Basically itinerant or mobile because we're either working in different parts of the americas and moving it around Or we're working digitally But we're really not that mobile I mean in one way because we need institutional support So this is where institutions come back to play a big role in something that imagines itself To be post institutional I mean my way of thinking of him he has been post institutional, but it's really really not I mean not if we think about it in terms of what it takes to be that And what it takes to be that is you need institutions so The home institution for hemi is NYU because that's where I work and that's where I started it But I started it with other institutional members and the reason that we went to institutional members rather than just say individuals was that We thought at the time the building something that we hoped was going to be americas wide in scope And that was going to be able to give room for us to teach courses together Share materials which meant archives Share teaching platforms and digital things which meant money. I mean all of these things take resources Now universities usually have a huge number of resources even Schools that are not so well funded. They have an infrastructure. They have internet They have all sorts of things that tend to get turned inwards for the student body for the faculty This way we chose to turn them outward and we use them to connect everybody to everybody. So that became really fantastic But in order to do this as I was saying to deb earlier today Two things happened. One was I didn't want to get NYU permission to do this So that meant there's an expression in Spanish, but I think we have it in English too That's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission So Hemmy went under the wire. We got our first grant in 1998 from the ford foundation and they've continued to grant to fund us uninterruptedly since then we got our last grant last night and So that has been an incredible source of support for us and rocker feller and melan and lots of other wonderful foundations have been Incredible, but so we started getting enough money before NYU realized what was happening And then when they realized what was happening then they decided that they were going to have to try to do something about it And so by this time it was getting to be a big drain on my time and on my Energy because I was chairing performance studies and I had to fundraise. So we like the staff positions I needed I had to fund I had to fundraise for everything So finally they got to be too much of a burden and I started talking to nyu about different kinds of support And finally we became a provostial institute. So that means that The provost took us under his Kind of wing. He set up a floor called the provostial institutes that we share with a couple of other a couple of other institutes and We get funding for the space and we get funding for four staff lines And I do the fundraising still for all of our programming and now as I said, it's a very very big deal We have a huge Digital video library where we have over 600 hours of streaming video performance from throughout the americas That's continuing to grow. We grow it 100 hours a year. So that's Doing very well. We have a physical archive, which we call the archive of last resort which is We envisioned it as the anti-colonial archive So instead of you know going and seeing Precious pieces from different parts of the world, you know in museums in the u.s. Or in germany or whatever we don't want to own anything But if artists feel that their materials will be destroyed or not cared for in their home countries And they've exhausted all possibility of keeping them in their home countries Then we'll take them so that they don't get destroyed So that's why we're the artist of the act. Sorry the archive of last resort We're also like your project multi Linguel we have four working languages spanish english portuguese and french And we have a whole series. We have now hemi press Where we do publications and we have all sorts of print book publications as well in many languages And the digital journal called emis ferica. So that's been a really Kind of huge Thing it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger because there's more and more people that get involved We get together every two years this last year was in montreal next year It's going to be in uh, santiago de chile And we have about a thousand people to participate in each of these get-togethers And then we have things that are going on all year. So that's Been a wonderful complement to performance studies And I think now nyu really does see it as a resource For performance studies and for the rest of the university because we work closely like with fey and with Libraries and with lots of other people at nyu. So That's been a really a wonderful Kind of a crossover Into this other format than the university Now I don't know if this is a model for a different kind of a university I always dream of being part of an open university of not having to Cater just to a certain population or in a certain country or in a certain language I teach a course as part of the hemi project every year. This one. It's going to be in chapas In july and it's on migration and human rights, you know, we're in the middle of this incredible political crisis of Hundreds of thousands of migrants coming from central america into the u.s in canada and there's About 200 000 people have been killed or disappeared in the last eight years So it's a major major. I'd call it humanitarian except it's man-made Um, and again sort of like your question. Where have we been and how did this happen? becomes for me a very very Urgent and burning question that I try to Spend as much time thinking about as possible. Anyway, so I'm teaching a course on migration and human rights in chapas I'll take 10 students from nyu And I will take 25 students. These are all grad students from other parts of the americas So that becomes a place for having a really for me Interesting and invigorating conversation. They don't have to take it for nyu credit. My students do if they want Um, the others don't have to take it for credit or they can take it for Credit at their home institution and do it for independent study And I'll just give the professor the grade and the report So it's not about the money-making operation. It's really about people who are willing to do interdisciplinary collaborative multilingual Super off-sighted, you know off-site work Together and so it's been a really incredible experience for me. This is my fourth year doing this and from the one in 2010 Uh, hemi graduate student conference started. So that's being Done every year and that students who first met in that course. So that's been really a wonderful thing So I've had a lot doing with that then recently Um, I was elected to be, uh President of the ml a so I'm now the second vice president and then next year I'll be the first vice president and then I'll be president And as I said, it's it says it's going to stay on my tombstone. It seemed like a good idea at the time And this is one of the things where I'm always thinking like it seemed like a good idea at the time because now it's like I don't know how I'm going to do all of this, but um I keep thinking I have a day job, you know, I actually do have to go and teach my students but um One of the things the reason I did it the reason I accepted it was because I felt that Being in this weird fabulous kind of free Uh space in relationship to institutions That performance studies my graduate students and performance studies, but also hemispheric Is also kind of on the borders on the margins of what becomes legible academically Disciplinarily and I thought the ml a is a good place as kind of this mammoth organization that thinks about Legibility legitimation and so forth and institutions to go back to the very center of that place and make the bid For the need for thinking about embodied practice For the need for thinking about this in relationship to but not instead of The things that go through print practice and to think about it in relationship to and again not In opposition to the things that go through digital Practice and the media so I would like to make these next three years there about trying to bring these forms of knowledge making and production into a productive conversation and hopefully Being able to leap over one more boundary. I'm hoping no more of these present themselves. I have enough to deal with Thank you very much Hello, and thank you for inviting me to U Penn as a matter of fact when I was applying to undergraduate schools 45 years ago This was my first choice I got in I went to brown, but I'll put that in my memoirs Why did that all happen? But I'm here to talk about rights and reason The theater and let me spell that for you because this happens people will have it wrong many times Even when they make a request to use our theater I will get okay. First of all, it's r i t e s And reason r e a s o n which was the name that our founder george houston bass gave it using rights as the origins of Performance of the theater and reason being the intellect being the intelligence that informs the actual creation of of art and the performance Sometimes we get reasons They go rights and reasons or this is the one that gets me r i g h t s And reason and I say we really want to use the rights and reasons space. I said once you learn how to spell it Then you may come back But what happens? What is the unique about rights and reason is that we are Uh a program of the african studies department at brown So we do not live in the theater arts taps as we call it theater arts and Performance studies the linkage is through my appointment. My tenure is in theater But the three quarters of my effort is in african studies We became a department in 2001 But we were founded in ninth with the um program of african studies began in 1969 and this is the heyday of the The protest era them give you this background So you will understand how the how rights and reason grew from being a uh a loosely organized The student group into becoming an Institution and with the ups and downs of what all of that means you've got because this is a story about the evolution well in uh december of 1968 there was a black student walk out at brown Now at that time the numbers of black students was about 60 But they dared to think that people gave a dam if the black students Left campus at a time when most campuses people were the protesting on the greens. They were taken over University halls. They said let's take a chance that people would give a dam and they actually did There was a article in the new york times during around that period and I power phrase um All uh brown offers course in black assertion and one of the little um gems in the article was um Almost all of brown's negroes walked off of campus. They might as well said they fled the plantation But they did and but soon after that um brown instituted something that at that time was called black admissions and then there was a um This effort to increase the black or the faculty numbers but to establish at that time what was called a black studies the program Well, so by nature a program has a has instructors from various Departments so african studies it continues to be have a Interdisciplinary focus and because rights and reason was housed inside of afro m at that time It too grew in terms of being an organically interdisciplinary enterprise So we have that um a history. So what we do and it's okay. That's the history, but what do you do? We have something called the rpm, which is the research to performance method Simply it is that we do research and I say we it happens in the classroom with my students that happens with professional writers it happens with Ideas that come from the providence the community members as well as the greater road island and the writer the composer it's sometimes team and and scholars Get together and they do research on a certain topic and then the artists transform that work into accessible and legible artistic product that educates and In sometimes Educates and seeks to inspire people to take action just a real the quick one one that I did back in 99 that we did again in 2003 in north Carolina was a project called heart to heart Which was funded by a lifespan? Hospitals and the idea came to us from the minority task force on heart disease which was a task force of the local american heart association and One day a woman just walked into our space and said Help me because she says black women are dying at alarming rates due to heart disease and stroke um PSAs are not working um Pamphlets are not working. We said we heard that you guys do something around research. Well Make it make what we ended up doing So that was a partnership that came to us from the the community telling us what they actually needed We did the research. I wrote the piece We traveled around to to to 10 sites in road island places that were not natural venues We went into community centers. We went into churches. We went into schools um The brown medical school gave us accreditation for the continuing of medical education uh the credits we had A health fair that traveled with this performance Such that people they they gave Histories on the health they they got screened for Hypertension cholesterol Diabetes and if these people were found to be in any kind of risk, we didn't just say okay. Good luck We actually said, okay. This is we're gonna help you and because there was issues around people not having insurance In in some cases there were women who had child care issues We had to find ways to address different ethnicities because we had people who were of african descent Who did not claim to be blacks therefore thought they were not at risk So we had to bust through that line also We had people who were afraid to come and get help because they thought they get deported So i'm saying i'm giving that as a very strong example of how we work with the the community what i did um in the early 2000s to increase my workload But it was something that i had to do and that was to put the rpm the research to performance method inside of the actual classroom so that we would have a Ongoing incubator, but also that's my job is to teach students. I had a lot coming to me So one semester i found myself with eight independent studies, and you know, that's that's the definition of insanity So i said i need one course. So i created this this course and and out of that we've done several Productions of works by my undergraduate students and very interestingly enough They were all done by students which it was their first time ever writing a play but they and we grew from from the Inception of rights and reason in in the 70s from being what i called a black theater to now becoming an Afrikanah the theater meaning i said okay one doesn't have to be British and white to take a course and learn about Shakespeare So one doesn't have to be african-american to take my course because we teach what what i teach is a method So we have done plays about Footbinding in ancient china. We've done Play about a history of hawaii. We've done performance about candle makers of kleks where young jewish boys were Uh drafted into the czarist army So we have been able to expand our scope as we continue to work with the community organizations, especially in around issues of health So these things come to us sometimes Organically and in each case, uh, they were black women who came to us and said okay We need you to do something on this something on that to to the point now. We're getting ready to initiate a project called rpm med sci Going back to the anchor play which was heart to heart that i wrote but then we had a student who did a play called june's blood which was about the impact of the Tuskegee institute on excuse me not the Institute the Tuskegee experiment Um, but she came at it through the vision of women how that impacted the lives of three generations of black women So i said okay Something's happening here. We we we are currently in the in process of Developing a work called skips in the record about alzheimer So we are partnering with alzheimer's association and then one that's on deck coming up That doesn't yet have a title but the issue is is breast cancer among black women So we kept getting these issues about health and black women. I said okay, because you know when you're trying to run an Organization institution you got to find the resources to make things happen So i said instead of trying to find funding for the one project per Let's put it on the one umbrella and come at it and partner with people in the Medical field people in the human resource field So this has been an ongoing evolution of what we do at rights and reason the challenges that that we are now Facing is an institutional one the first big challenge came when the founder george houston bass died unexpectedly in 1990 And i was one of george's Students for 20 years. He was my mentor and he was my friend And it this was such a shock and then i'm working in new york at national black in the theater After i left this Up-and-coming rising position as an administrative accountant for iBM uh, i was Recruited to come take george's job, and i had no idea how was being schmoozed i was so clueless Because i didn't even think i had the the credentials to teach at the college level So when i decided to come in i understood what the importance was institutionally being that usually In small groups like this, especially, you know, uh, non-white minority or white women groups gay groups latin or asian um Whenever the founder who's usually becomes the artistic director leaves either dies or leaves the institution dies So they knew it was very important that this go on so They got me and i said okay fine i'm going to come in i'm going to give you three years That was in 1991 I had a head full of black hair 22 years later i had to send out a A search party to find a black strand up here anywhere Something happens we say it's the water in in the providence that that keeps you there, but the uh, and then the other Institutional issue that came up was in 2008 when the research director red s jones passed away so After a year we found out that brown was not going to To fund the research director, which is the is a critical aspect if you're doing research to The performance work and we got some kind of excuse around There are enough people on the faculty to do that, but you need somebody to Coordinate that you just don't go through on a list and pick out names You have to coordinate a whole process and how do these people interface with the artist as A team so that gave us a clue i said oh we can be defunded at any moment At the whim of the university if we're not if we're not in favor if we're not You know in vogue or whatever we can be defunded so now that we we we are getting older You know those of us who were with george in the early days We're now in our late fifties and sixties so i said okay. I'm not going to be alive forever I'm not going to i'm not i'm not going to be here forever What's going to happen when those people who were who live the actual Experience are not here, so we're at the point now where we are actually dealing with issues of Replenishment and a succession and trying to put together A plan to make sure that rights and reason doesn't become a footnote in a history So that's pretty much our our overall Who we are but i just want to explain that the issues around Diversity especially which is an overused word To to the point where it doesn't have any meaning i think But we didn't go out saying oh we need a white person and we need an asian person We need a lat you know we need a mixed-blooded person people came just because of the equality of our work So at where we we are in a space where there's always a program to do this to increase diversity Or or trying to Go to the table and beg the powers that be please let us who do the arts Those of us who are in domains of performance, please let us in this door so in lieu of going and begging and demanding that we be accepted as full members who have Legitimate pedigrees We simply have we just simply do what we say we are And so we walk into the room and we the command it and that's the big Distinction i think between saying please let me in versus and i am already here. Thank you very much Okay, so um We have Deb um half an hour for questions 13 minutes, okay Wish wishes um, okay, so um Rather than me Opening up the question i'm gonna we're gonna jump right to the audience And i'm gonna walk over to you with the microphone so you can ask The question so We have one right here. Thank you. Thank you. Is that on? Yeah, thank you very much. Um, so my question is i'm just curious if any of you have any stories if you could Share an experience where perhaps you tried to invite someone in Higher administration to come and participate in a project To be part of the audience or to be a co-collaborator and we've been talking about how we Have all kinds of uphill battles to convince The powers that be at our universities to fund us to support us to give us resources and We make mission statements and vision statements that sort of match the discursive conventions of What they expect and hope that the match sounds good and then the money flows And i'm also wondering to what extent we might be able to solicit people in higher At administration to be co-creators with us And you know a lot of things that they need to do But particularly given the kind of collaborative work that all four of you do and very interesting projects that all are designed for multiple modes of participation in audience activities Have any of you ever gone that route to invite People to invite People in admin to join your projects to get a taste of it to be interlocutors in the trenches of what you do Thank you The one example i'd like to give is that our provost at nyu is a mathematician and He's probably close to 17 now And when i'd go to see him and give him an update on how we were doing at the hemispheric institute and One time i invited him to come down to mexico down to chat us with me We were opening up. I had worked we had worked with these mayan women To build them a theater and a and a cultural space with the help of the ford foundation And so i was going down regularly so for the opening we were going to invite Indigenous women from throughout the americas to the opening so i asked him if he wanted to come He said sure he'd come so he comes down to chat us with me and He's you know a very serious man and doesn't have i mean fake an attest doesn't have like a lot of broad interest Across things but He came and so there were all these indigenous women performing and a lot of bare breasts and a lot of Rockets behavior and a lot of stuff and he's sitting there and it just completely transformed him and transformed his appreciation of the project And i'm not exaggerating after that there wasn't anything he wasn't willing to try to do to help us Not that he could always do it But he was there and he couldn't believe it. He just couldn't believe it and So that was but that was exceptional in my whole professional life. That's the one time that that has happened I think of university administrators the same way. I think about central banker informants that probably 80 of them wouldn't be Perfect partners, but there are some there right who are struggling Within that space themselves to find meaning and to find you know and and and the trick is to find those people so We we've just opened our career office a new career office and the way that it came to be was that I went to korea to Give a give a talk give a big lecture And I had one of those introductory meetings with the president's office the vice president of the university Women's university was there and I just gave a sort of three minute thing about what I do and she said stop She said this is important. I said, yeah, and she said wait So tell me what say some more about this and I said I said and then she said All right, you know what? We're going to go see the president about this this afternoon I thought you're kidding right, but and she has become one of my closest friends She runs she mobilized that university and just made it happen And she said to me, you know, she said I I've worked like crazy my entire life I I I you know, I work 20 hours a day. I've built this university What's my legacy right and I need some place to give meaning and this is the thing that That's going to make my life worthwhile. So That's not going to happen again with everyone by any means but I again The only way that we've been successful I think unlike everyone else is so much more illustrious than we are it's been Through those personal relationships and somebody deciding that they're willing to throw everything they've got All the eggs in their basket behind this thing to make it happen and That's very effective. So I I think your questions get on Can I just add what what happened at brown within the last 10 years was really amazing So I've been at 22 years and it was very slow in getting support until this is around 2001 2002 When the previous president who was very popular president Ruth Simmons. She was a great Um The supporter of of the arts and through her and with a major funder We got a new arts building the the the grant of building but what came along with that was the Creative arts council that put all the arts units on campus into an Organization and it's been funded quite well There are things that I know that we at rights of reason could not do like our black lavender Experience that mr. Johnson came to twice. We could not have done and now there's one more that we're looking at We're not quite sure what it means, but there's a new associate a provost level director of the arts We don't know if that's to have direct communication or that to have an overseer, but time will tell Other questions Professor ginsburg Yeah, did you want to respond to the question? Happy to chime in. I just felt like people didn't get a chance to talk very quickly how to say, you know I think it's consistent with what everyone else is saying Don't regard people in the administration is you know, just I invite people to everything You kind of never know, um, I do a lot of work with indigenous artists and filmmakers from australia when we work we work with the australian consulate It's a really great time to pull the provost out the same person diana's talking about They love to you know, I'm not with dignitaries and then they actually get exposed to amazing things that as mathematicians Or whatever they don't usually get exposed to and they get impressed and then suddenly they have things that they want to talk about with you So, you know, I think it's just we because we do creative lively things every time you get a chance to just extend an invitation Um to people to you know invite them in I you know, I think you know before they were administrators They had hearts And loves and other things, you know, I found out like our dean a social science dean who's an economist like Loved is Jean Rouche because when he was in Istanbul going up like he went to a sine club in somebody's basement I mean like you just never know until you start schmoozing with people in the coffee shop Where your allies are so, um, I think I'm just supporting what everyone else is saying like, you know Talk to people assume they could be your friends figure out where the points of connection are Collaborate like crazy That's okay, I have a bad memory so I don't remember And the sharing of it and what you imagine needing to sustain it. I mean the next phase of things And that was just really important to me that people be able to speak and participate in their own languages so we built the platform which uh In which people can read messages and participate Uh On their iPhones or whatever, but they can eat everyone can read it and participate in their own language and behind that of course Is not a machine It's there's a bunch of grad students who with people with phd's really understand the conversation because I don't think that I just don't believe that a machine can do the same thing as Somebody who really understands what the conversation is about So that's one thing we've we've been approached by google to say why don't we'd like to fund? No, no, this is ethnography. It's not, you know computer science Um, I think um I actually think you have it's a great question. I'm not satisfied though I I feel really dissatisfied with The online format still like I just feel that It's not the same kind of conversation so far and I'm not quite sure what to do about that I mean the benefit of the online portion is that it slows it down My fear was you know Americans talk a lot and especially lawyers talk a lot And they talk they're loud and they they take up the whole stage and when you're dealing in a cross cultural situation I was really worried about the marginalization of certain voices So I thought if text would be one way to slow that process down But there are other problems with that So I'm really interested in what other technologies we might be able to use that would Enable force the loudmouth American lawyers to beat to listen and that's actually it's a real it's a serious question So I'm going to take it from a different angle which is The long-term preservation of all these materials And we have been very lucky at Hemi to have a partnership with NYU libraries So the the HIDVL, which is the Hemisphere Institute Digital Video Library, which has all of these materials Was funded by the Mellon Foundation and the idea was I mean Mellon always the thing with Mellon is you have to give to get right Mellon's very clear about that And so their thing was NYU had to sustain it Had to contribute the hundred hours of making it, you know growing every year and had to sustain it into perpetuity So that collection is Into perpetuity they have to sustain that which is fantastic because otherwise. What's the point of laboring like that to create these works? now Our Website is also part of a special collection for NYU Because that was one of the things I was insisting on because we have so many materials. We have our journals. We have our books We have all of these materials That why do all of this online if it's not going to be sustained so The I mean, there's still going to be huge problems, right because the platforms Are going to be changed. I mean that's maybe we'll be able to sustain the content But not the obviously not the platforms So what are we and so we're working on that constantly? But there's no solution to that and that's something that We'll keep inventing as we go along But the fact that we have institutional support to think that through and to work on those issues is huge Right because you know, it's been such an investment of time and energy into producing and creating all of that Archiving is is critical. We're actually in writes and reads and we're actually Four years into an archiving project that we are working on with USC because they have the state-of-the-art digitization Process that because because of the show a foundation. So we have we've already digitized about a hundred hours of Material that only covers a certain category over 10 years. So I'm working with our people in the media productions and with our librarian So that what we're trying to do is build a case to take it to the University because we have 45 years of of stuff mixed media Obviously, we get to a certain year Everything is going to be on a slide or a photograph lots of paper And we need a space to house all that but we we are very lucky at least to be in that process So that we said, okay already get the kind of big money is for the university to go after it because we can't afford to do it But yeah, that's that's I'm glad you raised a question. I wanted to raise that Thank you. Yeah Yeah, I could just chime in. Um, diane and I have we often coordinate a lot or are using similar resources Because we're known as a center for indigenous media about scholarship and curation and exhibition and we've had so many Fellows come from all over the world who are indigenous media makers This is sort of a sad story, but we can also be as kind of in a different way than diana, but in a similar sentiment The national museum of the american indians film and video center in new york city Which is an incredible resource and has a huge collection from across the americas of film and video Um is being shut down by the smithsonian because they decided to Sacrifice that for necessary for the budget cuts that came across this year for smithsonian institutions and because of the Library's amazing support of melin projects that diana would mentioned We were able we had a meeting about three weeks ago and we're going to actually transfer and upgrade the whole collection And make it a study collection at mru Um, which you know, so it's really we've had these very long-term partnerships across the city with these different institutions and that's one of them and it's come to fruition and we're just very Fortunate that we can help rescue that collection and make it available to our students So that's another kind of you know in addition to archiving our own work And I think diana's point of the impossible At the platforms are constantly changing if you're not upgrading I have a really big Sunday collection of films from all the different kinds of projects we've initiated and you know We're constantly having to upgrade to change their files and all that it's a bit of a nightmare. I think that um These kinds of things that we do they that the labor has really accelerated because of the demands of digital Platforms and social media communication and while that's also enhanced our Capacity to do the work we do. I think we all struggle under the increased workload and increased need for funding. These are very expensive modes of communication and preservation that need a huge amount of infrastructure and I think it's a You know a problem that we all face in different ways. We're constantly running to keep up with the costs of maintaining our own histories, so to speak Thank you. Um, I want to thank the panelists. This was a really wonderful panel. I want to thank you the audience Um, and we're going to move on to our next Session. Thank you so much into the Camera workshop excellent Sure. It's um, so feel what's your email address? Hi everyone, we're going to take about Three minutes to just kind of set up and get ourselves organized if you want to stretch your legs and go to the bathroom and then come back No, no, no stretching of legs. Just know that we're going to take three to five minutes. Yes No stretch We're ready for everyone if you could take your seats Hello Maybe we can take a break a little bit and then come back Thanks for already You know you're going to go over every seat. I mean you just have to build it 30 minutes in Which is the entire day of your workshop Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. So you have to build that image and know that you're going to be late, you know Yeah Why don't you start? Just as people trickle in and talk about camera You think so? No, I think Because it's 2.44, we have 15 minutes Only 15 minutes. It's from it was from 2 to 2 I'm sorry. It started out