04/14/2026
Join the Humanities Center next Wednesday, April 22 at 5:30pm in MCOM 067 when we close our year-long Humanity Speaker Series with a talk by Dr. Rebecca Louise Carter of Brown University.
In this presentation Rebecca Louise Carter considers the strategies that people deploy in the navigation of sorrow and joy and in the context of vulnerability, violence, and loss. Drawing from her ethnographic research in New Orleans’ African American religious communities, the presentation highlights the subtle shifts in orientation and affect, such as rituals of mourning and remembrance, testimonies, and fellowship, that reclaim lost loved ones in the space of death and transformation. Situating such practices as essential knowledge about human being and becoming in enduring and unendurable times, the presentation anchors humanistic social inquiry at the intersection of anthropology, black studies, and digital humanities. Sharing experimental and arts-based modes of ethnographic practice including collage and animation, Carter explores how such knowledge might be developed and shared, from the formatting of black experience in the post-digital age to the coding of black stories for social and spiritual repair.
Rebecca Louise Carter is a cultural anthropologist, educator, writer, and artist. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan (2010) and has a B.A. in psychology and art theory and practice from Northwestern University (1988). An Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University, Carter’s research interests focus on disaster and crisis, social and spiritual movements, and restorative practices of kinship and relatedness. Her first book, Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2019. The book won the 2020 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology and was a co-winner of the 2020 Edie Turner First Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing. Carter’s current projects develop through experimental and arts-based modes of ethnographic analysis, at the intersection of anthropology, Black studies, and digital humanities.
