Building Boundaries - Embodying a Relational Perspective in the Process of Research -- Workshop
- Sponsor
- Humanities Research Institute, Siebal Center for Design, American Indian Studies Program, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Access, Civil Rights & Community, Student Affairs
- Speaker
- Hali Dardar is an enrolled member of the United Houma Nation, and co-founder of the Houma Language Project and Bvlbancha Public Access
- Cost
- Free and Open to the Public, but Registration Required
- Registration
- Registration
- Contact
- Korinta Maldonado
- korintam@illinois.edu
- Originating Calendar
- American Indian Studies Program
Materials are said to be in cold storage when they are placed where they can be stabilized and cared for long term. These places are generally not easily accessible, but guarantee accessibility over a longer span of time and contexts. Cold storage is a promise of longevity, and a reference to disembodiment.
Cold storage is necessary and core part of memory care as it makes room for things in the moment. This talk and workshop is considering those things. Warm Storage is a 90-minute lecture and 90-minute workshop focused on community memory in this moment. It aims to provide stories and references to support the transfer, care, and storage of community memory within the current day’s constraints, technology, and needs.
This workshop is a two-hour block building off the personal story built in the lecture. This workshop asks students to build and discuss their own processes around community archiving topics. The focus are the entry and exit points of community memory - when material is accessioned or documented from the community into the collection, and the process of moving materials out of the collection and into the community. The workshop presents examples of these movements, elucidates further the complications on how these transfers are modeled differently between procedural and relational perspectives, facilitates discussion and personal digestion of these complexities, and provides templates for some templates which participants can revise for their own research or community use.
Bio
Hali Dardar is an enrolled member of the United Houma Nation, and co-founder of the Houma Language Project and Bvlbancha Public Access. Her works explore interaction design, new media art, and community process.
Dardar works at the intersection of media, memory, and community with roots in the Gulf South. Her experience spans community-centered media production, cultural documentation, and collaborative systems design, including building digital archives, conducting long-format interviews, and writing that links history to the present.
She is currently a Center for Louisiana Studies Fellow at the University of Louisiana (2026-2030), and an Indigenous Data Champions Fellow (2026). She has previously led collaborative project management and design for Language Vitality Initiatives at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Shift Collective, and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. She holds a BA in print journalism from Louisiana State University and an MA in Arts, Culture, and Media from the University of Groningen.