Former WGST director Suzanne Scott Constantine has been awarded a 2015-2016 CHSS Term Faculty Development Award. The award was created to recognize and support scholarship and creative activities by term faculty to enrich their teaching at Mason.
Suzanne’s project is a collaborative, multimedia scholarly performance entitled “’The World Hangs by a Thread of Verbs and Nouns’: Metonymy and Poetic Inquiry in the Demilitarization of Language and the Reinvention of the World.” The new work, which expands on topics that were part of her presentation for the 2014 Scholar’s Lecture, melds spoken word performance, visual poetry, call-and-response audience interaction, and theoretically informed reflection on the practices of teaching and artmaking. It builds upon her ongoing creative research in the making of artwork with fragments – of memory, of detritus of everyday life, of threads, and of scraps of fabric – to create visual and verbal metonymy as an expression of her commitment to social justice.
Suzanne will co-present a first version of this project with her longtime collaborator, Lynne Scott Constantine, a WGST faculty affiliate and School of Art faculty member, at the Fifth International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry in Vancouver, British Columbia, October 8-10. During the visit to Vancouver, Suzanne and Lynne also will conduct site visits and interviews with artists and curators in Vancouver whose community-based, engaged programs and practices articulate with their own concerns as teachers, artists and social activists.
June 30, 2015