My research

My research centers Articulation theory--how relations of subordination and dominance emerge--and Black cultural studies, with a focus on sound and social movements. My book, Black Thought: A Theory of Articulation is currently under contract with Routledge's African and African Diaspora series. 

IAS fellowship

My current project, "Improvisation as Poetic Computation," takes up computational methods to examine the implications of the Black Arts Movement's theory that improvisation models political praxis. Utilizing AI and deep learning technology, this project encodes the musical phrase from which this thesis was developed and models its evolution into the various genres in which it is found today. By mapping how agents decode what emerges from this phrase in a manner relevant to them yet appropriate to their environment, the evolution of improvisational modes of expression helps us model complex social systems. As a result, we can explain how mechanisms are put in place that set parameters on what type of expressions are or are not allowed to emerge.