Dr. Jazma Sutton in Residence September 2024

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Jazma Sutton will be in-residence September 2024 with the Speculative Play and Just Futurities program.

While in-residence in Indianapolis, Dr. Jazma Sutton will work on her latest project, “Moving Toward Freedom: Black Women, Slavery, and Freedom in Antebellum Indiana.”

Dr. Sutton’s project aims to explore the potential of speculative archives to uncover new ways of documenting the experiences of Black women in the antebellum Midwest. Through the creation of a digital archival resource guide, the project seeks to provide a critique of the production, collection, categorization, and future discoverability of sources related to Black women within Indiana's predominantly white archives. Moving beyond traditional archival practices to center the sources, archives, and oral histories produced by nineteenth-century Black women and their descendants, the project demonstrates how Black archives, and descendant knowledge in particular, can reshape our view of the past and how we preserve it in the future. 

About Dr. Jazma Sutton

Dr. Jazma Sutton (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor at Miami University. Her research focuses on the histories of slavery and freedom in the U.S. with a particular interest in African American women’s history and the Midwest. She is currently working on a book project that chronicles the lives of Black women--free, enslaved, and self-liberated-- in antebellum Indiana and the ways in which they overcame social, legal, and geographic obstacles to develop regional identities, carve out space for themselves as citizens, and ensure family survival.