Dr. Amber Jamilla Musser joined the CUNY Graduate Center Faculty in 2021 from George Washington University and recently joined the Futures Initiative as an Advisory Board member.
Her work largely focuses on race, queer femininities, sexuality, queer of color critique and critical theory, and her newest work, Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness and the Undisciplined, builds on her extensive research portfolio to explore “sensation as a Black feminist method for aesthetic interpretation”.
Regarding what the publication of this new book means to her and to society in general, Dr. Musser reflects, “because Between Shadows and Noise is a book about the different forms of knowledge that each of us brings to the table due to our situatedness, I’m looking forward to seeing how the book circulates and how people connect with it. The book is about many things: making our ideas of black experience more complex, the lived experiences of colonialism and imperialism, and the power of works of art to offer strategies for different ways of being and thinking. It is also about different forms of bodily knowledge and the Caribbean. As a whole, it is an experiment in unlearning rote methods in order to think with and through our bodies.”
In addition to her prolific writing, FI is very excited to announce that Dr. Musser will also be co-teaching a Team-Taught Course alongside Hunter College professor Dr. Nijah Cunningham entitled ‘Situated at World’s End’. This course, which will be offered at the CUNY Graduate Center in Spring 2025, reflects on “the different ways that knowledge is constructed by foregrounding the body and situations (and the different ways we can think about embodiment and location) of the critic”.
“’Situated at World’s End’ is a continuation of this investigation into learning itself. I see the course as offering a version of an intellectual history that prioritizes bodily and place-based knowledges. I’m interested in when bodily knowledges feel acceptable and when they do not. I’m also interested in how pedagogically to engage with bodily knowledges. How can we activate the senses more fully. Additionally, I’m excited to think about these questions in relation to AI, which is the learning algorithm that people are very concerned with right now– hence the world’s end of the title. Nijah [Cunningham] and I are bringing many questions to the class: Is AI a continuation of these processes or is it offering something different? How might we bring bodies into AI?” Prof. Musser adds. Between Shadows and Noise is available now through Duke University Press.
Dr. Amber J Musser
