The Latest from the Sound Justice Lab
The Sound Justice Lab was honored to meet with the 2024 Mandela Fellows
The Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders brings accomplished innovators and leaders to the United States for six weeks to study civic engagement and share about their work. We hosted a panel on the theme of “Creative Activism” highlighting the work of Cville Tulips and PVCC’s Higher Education in Prison Program and we learned about a variety of programs from the fellows, including creativity in environmental activism in Ethiopia, international gender justice legal work in Nigeria, and programming for young refugees in Tanzania.
Thursday, July 11, 2024
In collaboration with Sound Justice Lab, this issue of MALA LECHE invites a wide range of submissions of prose, poetry, short stories, and visual art (protest posters, anyone?) from women, non-binary, trans*, and gender-expansive artists from the Central Virginia area, and invite creatives to explore varied representations of this theme.
Cville Tulips Teens Host Radio Show on WXTJ 100.1 FM
Seven middle and high school students involved in Cville Tulips took to the airwaves on Monday, February 19th to share some of their favorite songs with the public. The playlist included music by artists from Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Tajikistan, and even a little Taylor Swift.
Thank you to the UVA Parents Program for supporting this project!
SJL Co-Director, Anne Coughlin, discusses The Molly Pitcher Project on The Lioness Origin Story Podcast
In 2011, The Molly Pitcher Project was founded by four students in Professor Coughlin’s Law and Public Service Class and in 2012, the project launched a lawsuit challenging a US Military ban on women serving in combat. As a result of this exclusionary policy, their two plaintiffs, Army Reserve Command Sgt. Maj. Jane P. Baldwin and Army Col. Ellen Haring, were excluded from many high-ranking positions which required combat experience. Furthermore, by 2011, many women were serving in essential combat roles as soldiers but were excluded from training, resources, and recognition for their combat roles. While this lawsuit was underway, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced in January 2013 that the military would lift the ban on women serving in direct combat roles across the six branches of the military. In this episode of Lioness: The Origin Story, plaintiff Haring says of the Molly Pitcher Project, “I’ve subsequently met a number of people that were serving at the Pentagon, especially in the JAG corps, and they said that absolutely those lawsuits had an impact because there was nobody at the Pentagon that wanted to try and defend against this. So they did think that we were at a tipping point, the lawsuits just tipped us.”
Cville Tulips Receives Funding from UVA Parents Program & Bama Works
Cville Tulips is grateful to the UVA Parents Program for it’s support! This funding supports our dedication to creating high-impact experiences for UVA undergraduates who work with Cville Tulips. This includes our expanded training curriculum for students to improve their skills working with children, working with refugees, working across language barriers, and learning community engagement best practices and leadership skills.
We also want to thank Bama Works for funding our new Arts-Based Health Education Program! This program brings healthcare providers to Cville Tulips gatherings to host discussions on health topics suggested by the women. This program responds to a clear and articulated need for culturally responsive healthcare in our local refugee community.
SJL Co-Director, Nomi Dave, published in Africa is a Country
Thank you to YEMSA at UVA for donating hundreds of feminine hygiene products to Cville Tulips!
The Youth Education and Maternal Support Association (YEMSA) at UVA aims to both provide support for women/mothers in need and to support youth education in the Charlottesville area and beyond.
Bremen Donovan & Nomi Dave have been awarded a
digitization grant through the Modern Endangered Archives Program
Their project, Preserving Political Cartoons in Guinea, is a collaboration with Le Lynx, a weekly political newspaper that uses satire and caricatures to cover current events. As the oldest independent media outlet in Guinea, its archive represents an unparalleled collection of news, commentary, art and humor from West Africa.
SJL Co-Director, Bonnie Gordon, publishes new book
An exploration of the castrato as a critical provocation to explore the relationships between sound, music, voice instrument, and machine.
Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of these technologically enhanced singers, with their unique timbre, range, and strength, contributed to a dramatic expansion of musical vocabulary and prompted new ways of imagining sound, the body, and personhood.
Connecting sometimes bizarre snippets of history, this multi-disciplinary book moves backward and forward in time, deliberately troubling the meaning of concepts like “technology” and “human.” Voice Machines attends to the ways that early modern encounters and inventions—including settler colonialism, emergent racialized worldviews, the printing press, gunpowder, and the telescope—participated in making castrati. In Bonnie Gordon’s revealing study, castrati serve as a critical provocation to ask questions about the voice, the limits of the body, and the stories historians tell.
Community Collaborator, BAD MILK PRESS,
Launches MALA LECHE #7
“In this seventh issue of MALA LECHE, each artist and writer explores their own answers to these questions. They share with us philosophies of rest and self-care. what it is to locate places of rest and to grow them. They reach into deeply emotional pasts and presents and surface truths about the difficulty of cultivating ease, then teach us ways to put it into practice. I hope the space in these pages becomes a soft place of your own, Reader. I invite you to take a moment out of your day, and rest.”
~ Erika Chu, Guest Editor of MALA LECHE #7
features contributions from Nomi Dave
and Bremen Donovan as well as three
other researchers: Adrienne Cohen, Carrie
Rentschler and Jesse Weaver Shipley.
SJL WELCOMES NEW FACULTY & COMMUNITY COLLABORATORS
Assistant Professor
of Politics and Religious Studies,
Dr. Larycia Hawkins
Associate Professor
of Religious Studies and African
American and African Studies
Dr. Ashon Crawley
Sri Kodakalla & Ramona Martinez
Co-Founders of Bad Milk Press
PRACTITIONER IN RESIDENCE, MOLLY CONGER, LAUNCHES NEWSLETTER!
SUBSCRIBE TO THE DEVILS ADVOCATES.
“When hate goes on trial, the devil gets a lawyer.”
Sound Justice Exploratory Seminar at the
The Sound Justice Lab is grateful to the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for a fulfilling and inspiring two days.
Thank you so much to Andrea Dennis, Farah Peterson, Brittany White, Lorelei Lee, Mame Fatou Niang, Martine Granby, Rebecca Richman Cohen, Trevor Reed, Simon Stern, and Sindhumathi Revuluri for attending. We are honored by the creativity, wisdom, and honesty you shared with us.
THE JEFFERSON TRUST AWARDS $150,000 TO CVILLE TULIPS TO EXPAND ENGLISH LITERACY PROGRAM FOR LOCAL REFUGEE WOMEN.
Since February 2022, Afghan refugees in Charlottesville have been meeting regularly to learn English, enjoy creative exploration, engage in wellness activities and build connections.
Jefferson Trust funding in 2023 enables Cville Tulips to expand and enrich every aspect of its programming by supporting:
Professional and intentional English instruction for women.
Digital literacy including keyboarding and accessing school and medical information on the internet.
The purchase of tablets for digital literacy training.
Assessments of Students and Participants.
Robust training workshops and curriculum for our undergraduate volunteers.
Paid student interns who will gain leadership experience.
Transportation needs for participants allowing for more frequent events.
Watch the Legal Practicioner’s panel with former No Limits rapper Mac Phipps, UVA Law Professor Darryl Brown, journalist Molly Conger and VA ACLU Legal Director Eden Hellman.
WITH SHORTAGE OF BUS DRIVERS, UVA STUDENTS WALK CHILDREN TO SCHOOL
Madison House volunteers are walking children, who range from preschool to fourth grade, to Clark Elementary School. (Photo by Erin Edgerton, University Communications)
These little kids have a lot of energy at 7 a.m.!” exclaimed third-year University of Virginia student Rachel Moore.
Moore is one of dozens of UVA students helping Charlottesville elementary school children walk to school safely because of a shortage of bus drivers….. Click to read the whole article.
IVLP PROGRAM BRINGS UKRAINIAN DELEGATION TO CHARLOTTESVILLE
What does it look like, through the justice system, to pursue peace? Is criminal law always part of the equation to keep our communities and countries whole after conflict?
These questions highlight key themes of discussion during our most recent program, which welcomed four government and NGO leaders from Ukraine through the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP)…. Click to read the full article.
