Ph.D. student Manoucheka Celeste, lower-right, visited Haiti in March where she volunteered at a clinic. Celeste is from Haiti and her research focuses on representations of race, gender, class and citizenship in popular media.

Student Spotlight: Ph.D. student Manoucheka Celeste

Manoucheka Celeste is a fourth-year doctoral student whose research in media studies focuses on representations of race, gender, class and citizenship in popular media. She is currently working on her dissertation on the construction and representations of legitimate and illegitimate citizenship. Her research is supervised by Jerry Baldasty, Ralina Joseph, Michelle Habell-Pallan, Susan Harewood and Habiba Ibrahim. She is the Lead TA for the 2010-11 academic year for the department.

Haitian earthquake put PhD student's research into public discussion

By Manoucheka Celeste

It took a few months to get there, but I was finally able to make it to Haiti in March, a trip that fueled my research and other parts of my life. My work is inspired by broader issues and unfortunately the earthquake made it necessary for me, and many scholars who do research on Haiti, to work, often times very publically. I was able to speak with UW News Lab students about their work and journalism in moments of crisis and together we talked about what the news coverage meant, as it was happening. I participated on a panel, Disasters in the Global South: Media and Human Rights, sponsored by United Nations Association of Greater Seattle and Jackson School of International Studies, with Drs. Marisol Berrios-Miranda and Veronica Barrera. There, we discussed the coverage of and human rights issues surrounding the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti. Finally, at the end of March I was able to volunteer in Haiti, which is where I am from and many of my family members live. Although I was not able to make contact with them, the week was filled with long and amazing days of assisting in a clinic. I joined Family Health Ministries in one of a series of Medical Relief trips. I was able to get patient information working in the triage area and do other tasks throughout the day. (I used to want to be a doctor, but hated chemistry, so it’s a bit ironic.) The doctors and nurses from the U.S. and Haitian translators were just phenomenal in the way that they took care of the patients and the great pleasure they took in their work. I came back with the commitment to do work that seeks to make change in the social world and take great pleasure in that.

My preliminary research on coverage of Haiti’s earthquake was presented at this year’s Dialoguing Difference Conference, which has provided a springboard for me to develop two papers and ultimately a dissertation chapter. I have taken some of the feedback from faculty who were generous enough to meet with me after the conference and will present the next draft at the Haitian Studies Association Conference at Brown University in November. I have developed a different strand from the same event (the earthquake) to do a more broad analysis of the news coverage of the earthquake. I will present this at NCA this year on a panel Blackness and Disaster: Discourses of Race and Neocolonialism in Katrina, Haiti, and Africa with fellow Communication graduate student Katherine Bell, two presenters from other universities, and chaired by Ralina Joseph. Much of this work is based on a book chapter that I wrote for the 3rd edition of Images That Injure, which will be out at the end of this year.

WOCC Dialoguing Difference Conference, Sponsored by the Diversity Research Institute:

The UW Women of Color Collective and the the Dialoguing Difference Conference were born out of necessity, primarily the need to create a space where women of color scholarship is taken up and an occasion for us to bring together a community where many work in isolation.

This year’s conference was a bigger success than we ever imagined. We attracted students, staff and faculty from across the UW community including presenters and participants from UW Bothell as well as people in the Seattle community who were looking to engage with the scholarship that pays attention to difference. We had more than 300 participants and are looking forward to organizing another exciting conference next year. There are very few if any places on campus where this range of people assembles. For me, this conference was about creating spaces where I can think about my own work and, even if only for a day, get re-energized by those who are taking the risk of doing radical scholarship. Participants in their feedback expressed the same sense of being energized. One person wrote, “I gained knowledge that I could have never hoped to learn anywhere else from courageous, intelligent women, a few of who I know and most of who I did not. I admire each of them. I found academic role models.” (This is what the conference is about!)

I presented my own work on news coverage of the earthquake in Haiti, using responses from my January 26 opinion piece in The Seattle Times.

In describing the collective,  Madhavi Murty wrote, “… it is many layered and multi-vocal, it bears the traces, the marks and the echoes of many voices, many theories, many experiences and many discussions, each as important as the other. Some voices may seem distant, some old, but the collective would not have been possible in their absence.”

As many women of color scholars have sought to hold institutions accountable for deeming us invisible, we must be extra vigilant in ensuring that we do not do the same to each other. This year’s conference reflects lessons we learned from last year and a desire to honor all of the ways that we produce knowledge. Our conference theme is a call to consider ‘Technologies of Visibility,” which is influenced by Michel Foucault who argues that visibility is a tool of those in power as well as a necessary component of resistance. What are the ways that marginalized people write themselves into existence and as resistance?

At the June graduation ceremony, the Women of Color Collective was awarded the Women Studies Departmental Service Award for the conference! We were so thrilled to be honored not only for the physical labor, but the intellectual labor that goes into putting this conference together. (Editor's note: Read more about this award in The Seattle Times.)

In November 2009, we presented our work at the National Women’s Studies Association’s Annual Conference in Atlanta on a panel with faculty from UW: Ralina Joseph (Communication), Michelle Habell-Pallan and Angela Ginorio (Women Studies).

Along with continuing this conference and planning other events throughout the year, we are looking to create an anthology of the work that has been presented at the conference.

Members of the Collective: Manoucheka Celeste (co-founder), Sara Diaz, Martha Gonzalez, Noralis Rodriguez, Balbir Singh (co-founder), Madhavi Murty, Camille Elmore-Trummer (Communication alumna, 2009), Jenny Hammond.