Engagements

On January 6, 2021, as a mob of white Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, voters in Georgia—particularly Black voters—inaugurated a new era by electing Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the US Senate, delivering a key victory for Biden and the Democratic Party.

Within the first three months of 2021, 33,000 unaccompanied children arrived at the United States – Mexico border. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) responded by opening large-scale facilities, ranging from 1000 to 4500 beds, to house them.

Dispossession can be a creeping process. In addition to more flagrantly recognizable modes of dispossession (i.e. the forced and coerced removal of people from their land), the culmination of minor events can cause certain places and ways of being to become so unlivable that they are ultimately avoided.

In the past few decades some museums of “natural history” have revisited their collections and reexamined their curatorial practices in efforts to shift away from grand narratives grounded in museums’ roles in imperial formations to foster spaces wherein artifacts can be engaged as dynamic and agentive, and as having the capacity to generate dialogue, disagreement, and affect among museumgoers.