TO BE - NAMED

As the grant coordinator at AUCA for the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN), the CASI Director is currently overseeing AUCA’s contribution to the “To Be Named” project, a collaborative endeavor jointly conceived by EHCN and the Smithsonian to examine the politics and significance of naming in colonial and post-colonial settings. AUCA’s iteration of the project, “My Name, My Story,” involves creating a digital archive of oral history interviews with local communities to explore the meaning of names in contemporary Central Asia and to examine the ways in which they allow individuals to simultaneously reject the past, restore tradition, and imagine alternate futures.

To complement this more distinctly academic exploration, CASI hopes to involve local artists in translating the project into digital, photographic, and multimedia works and to have them respond through art and technology to the way the project envisions the meaning of Central Asian names. The project will embody EHCN's goals in creating scholarship on the humanities that is also transformed by practice and technology while also reinforcing CASI’s commitment to mobilizing network resources, and to participating in-network programs, that support humanities research.