OreOluwa Badaki

OreOluwa Badaki:
I did my research through embodied storytelling. Embodied storytelling is understanding the stories that our bodies tell, as well as figuring out interesting ways to tell stories through our bodies. And I did that because I find it the most natural way for me to understand the spaces I'm in and also invite others into that collective and collaborative understanding.
My dissertation was a three-year critical ethnography on the literacy practices of use of color working in urban agriculture in Philadelphia, which basically means I spent a lot of time hanging out with young folks who were involved in urban agriculture internship programs. So they're learning how to be farmers, food justice advocates, chefs. And I was interested in how they were defining what it meant to be food literate, environmentally literate, what was bringing them to that space, and why they thought it was important.
Many of the themes, or I guess the major themes that came out of this work, they were involved in different learning activities as they were being trained to participate in this organization or in this work. The first, I think, would be the importance of criticality in understanding what it means to be food literate or environmentally literate. So a lot of the scholarship is about having prescriptive methods or prescriptive orientations.
Young people should do x, y and z. But a lot of what came out of this work was the fact that young people wanted to be critical about those prescriptions. So we were reading food labels, for instance, and one of the things that was most interesting to them was understanding why food labels were designed the way they were, who made that decision. Why certain nutrients were prioritized over others, thinking about the history behind that. So yes, knowing what's healthy is important, but also how we decide what's healthy.
I think the second theme is collectivity. So a lot of this work was done in community spaces, intergenerational spaces. And having conversations with family members was an important part of them deciding or coming to an understanding of what it meant to be literate in this space. Lots of storytelling, lots of interviewing, dance parties, food parties, all of the above.
And then the last I think would be creativity. So a lot of these young folks were storytellers, poets, writers, in addition to wanting to gain skills in food cultivation and agricultural knowledge. So it was nice to see them be able to invite some of their creative talents into the space as well.
My dissertation took, I guess three forms. One was a more traditional write-up. I wrote a lot, so about 300 pages. But within that, that work spawns multiple modes of understanding the work I was doing. So two other outputs that came out of that specific, or my dissertation, was what you see here, which is a dance film based off of one of the chapters on seed keeping. So this piece is a representation of some of the findings that came out of my interviews around the importance of seed keeping and seed saving in this space.
And the second is a screenplay that I started writing with some of the young people who were interested in telling creative stories about what they were learning on the farm, about agriculture, about the environment, about climate, and about the history and politics that surround those topics. The dissertation was an iterative design. So some of my questions came from previous questions and previous data collection methods. So for instance, this film came out of a series of field notes that I then brought to the writing group and asked, what do you make of these notes that I'd taken based off my observations, some of the young people I'd worked with for many years. And so some of these notes were from two, three years ago when they were observing themselves and looking back at the things they had said in some of my initial interviews when I came to the farm.
So I think the data, these modes came up as I was sharing them with the writing group, and they also came up in community conversations and community celebrations where we would share young people's writing. We would share their different creative takes on what was happening at this space. We had something called a celebration of learning every semester or every season, so young people had the chance to come and share what they were learning, and this piece was part of that.
Before I started the writing group, I spent a couple years just being in the space, and because I didn't come in with the substantial profound knowledge in farming or agriculture, I wanted to be useful. And I knew a lot about dance. I had been studying West African dances and the ways in which knowledge about food, knowledge about food ways were incorporated into those dances.
And so sometimes I would teach workshops, just little workshops here and there, which then made their way into the writing group in that we would start off sessions really thinking about how are we entering this space? Not everybody's a dancer, not everyone needs to be a dancer, but we all have bodies. So thinking about what are our bodies telling us? And also thinking about when we're writing scenes, when we're writing scripts, we're thinking about what bodies are doing in that space. Stage directions, action lines. And so that was the way also, even if we and ourselves weren't moving, we were thinking about movement and thinking about what that movement conveyed, didn't convey, why we wanted it to convey it or not. It came about when I felt stuck. So I would sometimes take writing home or I would take something that a youth participant wrote and sit with it for a while, and I wouldn't know what to do with it.
So I would act it out or I would turn it into something that made sense to me and I'd bring that back into the space. And sometimes people engaged with me in that way. Sometimes they didn't. I wanted to make sure it was a space where if somebody felt more affinity towards being the director in the space, if we're doing a devising scene, devising exercise, and they actually just wanted to sit back and see how things were going, they could do that. If somebody really wanted to think about the set design instead of being somebody who being a character, they could do that. So inviting different ways. We didn't all have to do the same thing, but I think it definitely was an emergent design and it was something that each step was based off of the previous step.
Oral contributions in terms of discussions are definitely privileged in many ways, and that's important. But if somebody actually, if we were trying to figure out what's happening in the scene and somebody didn't want to say something, but they did want to maybe draw what the set would look like, that sort of invited them into the conversation as well. And so I think in terms of what it was allowing, it just made it so people didn't necessarily have to think of themselves as only their ideas in the space. They could try and think of how they can move in this space and another that would be another entryway into making a contribution.
It helped lower the stakes, if that makes sense. It made it feel less of a extractive exchange. When I'm thinking about how I'm breathing in this space, if I'm positioned in a way that it makes you feel uncomfortable or comfortable, it helps me think more about how I was engaging with people as a human, not necessarily as a researcher.
And because I find a lot of joy in dance and a lot of joy in movement, I find myself dancing all the time. And so I think that also helps people not necessarily take themselves too seriously. It made me not take myself too seriously. So yeah, I think it just helped me invite my whole body and my whole self into this space.
Being comfortable with not knowing where you're going all of the time and refining your listening capacity for folks who can help you figure that out. And sometimes that is within academia that I had a lot of incredible mentors in my academic space, but sometimes that came from my dance instructor or somebody's grandmother at the farm. So I think it helped me when I did not know where I was going, just being able to listen better and try and trust that my inquiry didn't change.
I knew the question. I knew what I was trying to find out. But that didn't mean that the way the methods I was using or the process I was using to answer that question didn't change. I knew from the beginning I didn't want to spend a lot of time working on something that five people would see. I think there is a lot of validity in really having a close-knit community that is deeply invested in this work. But I knew that I wanted... Audience was an important part for me. So being able to share a film, a dance film, or being able to share parts of a script. At one point we made a scene, an audio play. It was very rudimentary, but that was the best part for me, and it was sharing it and bringing it to the communities that I cared about, or at least inviting them to be a part of that process.
The screenplay was a collaborative work, so it didn't put... It wasn't sole authorship, so it wasn't like, this is what I'm offering to you all, and it was deliberately done so that you couldn't necessarily pinpoint like, so-and-so wrote this, and so-and-so said this. So it didn't feel... All the weight wasn't on my shoulders, and especially I think the community you surround herself with is important. So the folks I was sharing it with, the folks that young people were engaged with wanted us to succeed. So the feedback didn't feel as if it was trying to tear it down. It just was, okay, how do we do this better?
So I would actually invite teaching artists because I myself, I love writing for performance. I am not a professional in any way. So we would invite writers, we would invite actors, screenwriters more specifically. We had a dramaturg come in to really refine our skill set and refine our capacity to tell these stories. And sometimes they would point out things, inconsistencies that we didn't see, but it was all in good nature and try to move this story forward, which we're still writing. It's always a process, but it didn't feel... At least so far, it didn't feel too heavy.
The advice I would give is advice that was given to me, which, and not by somebody who thought of themselves as a multimodal scholar, but somebody who thought of themselves as, or who attempted to do rich, rigorous community-based... Community-driven because I think there's a difference, community-driven research, and that was one, spend time finding out how to be useful in this space. I think people come, some people do research and they already know their dissertation site or they're experts in a specific field that they're doing their research in. I was not an expert in the topic I was doing research in, and so I spent a lot of time just listening and not being very precious about what I had to offer. But if there were things I could do, I tried to step up to do them.
And then when I found out, when I figured out what I could do, that's I think where the multimodality maybe emerged, not because I said I wanted to do multimodal stuff, but because I saw that there were young people in this space who had this incredible creative imaginaries and mindsets and skill sets, and they were definitely being cultivated in other ways in this space, but I really wanted to spend more time with it.
The screenplay came out of a story, a short story that one of the youth participants wrote a year and a half before we started the writing group. I just thought it was a great story, and I thought it would be great to bring people together to see how far these characters could go, what the world we can build from this story. So I think the first piece of advice is spend the time. If you are in a dissertation program or if you are doing your dissertation... I was doing ethnography. So that's a valued aspect in spending time in a community. So if you can do that, I would say do that, and also trying to be useful in that space. And so that's number one.
I think number two is, I guess just the flip side, which is heavily leaning on that community to do this work. Writing a dissertation can be presented as something that's very isolating and sometimes is, but I know for me, one of the reasons I started a collaborative writing group with the young people rather than having each of them write their own stories, was because I did feel the support that you could engender when you're all working on the same story, even if you're doing different things, can be really powerful. I, myself, when I was writing my dissertation, didn't necessarily do dissertation boot camps or dissertation writing groups.
I was in playwriting groups and creative writing groups, and it was the pandemic, so I could participate in different groups, but I just wanted to be surrounded by people who were writing, people who were inspiring, people who reminded me that this dissertation was just one genre of writing. And so that was really helpful. I leaned on my dance community as I was unpacking the relationship between movement and food ways, dance practices and food ways. So I would say, yeah, try and be useful in the community and really lean on that community as you're trying to finish this really hard thing that you're doing.
This played a major role in my dissertation, but even more so now, I think the work of performance ethnographers like Soyini Madison, Omiyo shun [inaudible 00:14:32], Joneal Jones [inaudible 00:14:34] and dance scholars. People who are dancers themselves and they study dance. Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Kariamu Welsh. I think especially women, women of color, people who think about Africa and the diaspora, and more specifically because a lot of the work... The farms I was working at, were thinking about that aspect of food ways and agriculture.
So their work has been really inspiring to me because it's deep, rigorous ethnographic work, and it's deeply creative and critical, and they find just really mesmerizing ways to weave storytelling together that uses data and uses stories and uses different modalities in really thoughtful ways. This tapestry that we had put together as sort of an extension of this piece, and part of the thinking behind that was having people be able to step in to follow the footpath of this piece.
I think about embodiment a lot as a dancer, but again, I don't think everyone needs to think of themselves as a dancer, but I think it's helpful for us to think about how we move through space. And so a lot of the work, the non-textual work I do will be movement-based and is movement-based. So people, whether they're dancing the piece or just stepping in the footpath and understanding the story that motivated this footpath, I think would be a great honor. I'd love to take this into other spaces, do workshops based off of it. And people building on choreography if they aren't dancers, right, building on some of the choreography, the pieces that I put out there and adding their own rendition, their own version, that'd be dope. That'd be really cool. Even in this piece, there's so much media. So this is a still, this is a recording.
This is documenting of a dance that I did. Another version is just me doing the dance here and now. And then another version is me doing it in that space in a specific time. The modality that I gravitate towards the most is ephemeral for the most part. It's not something to move your body is dependent on that time and space, but you can make a film of it. You can still. You can recreate that movement on tapestry. And so I think when it comes to documentation, there's, okay, well, do I make a film about it? Do I write about it? But also, I had to write the text that informed this piece was the thing that informed this piece was field notes. It was text, it was writing, so it was already part of the process.
My choreographic practices, I write a lot first before I... Not all the time, but writing is deeply involved. So yeah, I think finding out what makes the most sense for who. This piece was actually inspired by a song as well, but I didn't have the copyrights to that song. So the movement then had to go elsewhere. What's the world you want it to live in and what's the best way in which it can live in that world?
Before I actually defended, this was used as an exemplar for the writing group as a way to think of another. Working with a specific passage, we're thinking about other ways to represent it. So this was not performed in front of them. I had done some of the choreography in front of the writing group itself, but it was not part of my dissertation defense. This was part of the process. This wasn't the thing I turned in.
I, again, thinking about embodiment and movement, but in different platforms. And so I'm working on a podcast right now that looks at the role that dance plays in African diasporic storytelling and I... We're still actually working on the screenplay that we'd started. We're continuing taking versions of different scenes and creating audio dramas based off of them. There's a really cool organization app in Philadelphia called Trail Off that basically maps audio dramas with certain trails in Philadelphia and people can, it's I guess, responsive technology. So you're pacing and you can choose your own adventure, and the story will mold to your prop, the way you walk the path. So that's movement. Talking to them. That's really cool. But we do want to actually finish this screenplay at some point.
Oh, I am also working on new choreography. I think I would love this piece to be part of the first of a series of pieces around... This piece is called Seed and Sound around the role that dance has played in seed keeping and preserving the stories of certain seeds that are indigenous to West Africa, as well as food practices and food ways that are indigenous to West Africa. So hopefully there'll be Seen and Sound round two and three coming your way soon.
I look to storytellers. The storytellers I find the most engaging. I think multimodality for me is just about telling robust, rigorous stories through research. And I think the first storytellers I knew were my parents. I think everyone's going to probably say something about their parents, but I know my mom is maybe one of the funniest people I know, and her humor has a way of bringing everybody into the fold. And I think that's kind of seeped into my whole family's humor. And so that was actually really helpful for me when I was doing my fieldwork in that, when I was working with young people, when I was in community spaces, when people are laughing, there's a little bit more openness to even if there is tension, even if there is drama. So using humor to tell interesting stories, to tell collective stories. My dad is an incredible historian and archivist, so really finding a way to bring history alive is another quality I find really compelling in storytelling.
And that's another reason why when we were thinking about something like food labels, not just what is in front of you, but what is the actual historical legacy? Why does this food label look look different from what's in Australia versus what's in Zimbabwe? So I think they were my first storytellers, and I deeply appreciate the storytelling components they embedded in me. Another storyteller, my favorite writer, her name is Helen Oyeyemi. She writes fiction, but she has this incredibly wonky way of making... I think any good writer does this... But making the ordinary extraordinary. She writes these characters that don't. She has Nigerian heritage, and she grew up in Britain, but she writes stories of people in Eastern Europe, which it feels very far out of her, what she might be writing about, but it's just incredibly personal. And I think she has a good way of setting you up, the way she describes bodies and humans to set you up to think a certain way about the character and then completely destabilize what you thought.
So I really love her storytelling, and it's just really kind of whatever this is, I don't have a word for this, but this is her storytelling. I'm a dancer as well. There's lots of dancers I think are incredible. I love hip hop and two of my favorite dancers, Keoni and Mary Madrid. They're a married couple and choreographers. They do a lot of work. They're just incredibly lyrical. They bring in hip hop. They bring in modern dance, contemporary dance, but they tell incredible stories with their movement, and again, sort of unexpected ways. And the way they partner, I think, is really thoughtful and innovative.
And I find myself doing a lot of their choreography alone in my bedroom when I want to just get hype. And I think, oh, this isn't a specific person, but when we were writing the screenplay as part of my fieldwork, one of the films that was kind of like one of the anchors is a short film called Pumsey, and it's a short film and it's kind of Afro futurist, but it's very little dialogue. And I just feel like it's really evocative in how it asks you to question what makes sense in this world without explaining anything. And I don't know if she was thinking about embodiment, if that was part of it, but that was definitely something that really felt resonant with me. So that's a lot. I'm going to end there.