Rethinking Multimodal Praxis during Covid-19

Arlene Fernández, an awardee of CEE's Multimodal Research Grant, grapples with the task of reshaping the direction of her work in the wake of COVID-19.

Like an almost unceasing drumbeat, we are being confronted with questions of life and death, and the injustices reflected in who lives and who dies have been as profound as they have been predictable.

As I imagine many of us must be feeling, this year has taken me by surprise with its persistent existential demands. Like an almost unceasing drumbeat, we are being confronted with questions of life and death, and the injustices reflected in who lives and who dies have been as profound as they have been predictable. As an emerging scholar laying the foundation of my research in critical communication and cultural studies, I have been in a state of perpetual uncertainty about what a critical ethnographic and multimodal praxis can look like during COVID-19 and how to rethink or reshape the direction of my work “in the wake,” to invoke Christina Sharpe (2016).

To that end, it seemed timely that I would begin what I had hoped to be the beginnings of a multi-sited, multimodal ethnographic project in Latinx corner stores with a filmic meditation on a photographic archive of bodegas in New York City by photographer Justo A. Martí placed in conversation with an interview (filmed pre-COVID-19) with my father, a former bodega owner in New York, called “Bodega Memories.”

This summer, I was able to complete an early cut through which I began to develop the narrative form of the project and engage the public discourse framing the “essential worker.” Diving into a “living” archive through the interview with my father, I began reflecting on the incongruencies of what it means, in this case for Latinx (im)migrant workers, to be both “essential” and expendable and what these particular archives might reveal and obscure.

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