Seeing a place through someone else's lens can shape how we imagine it. In this final episode of Series 2, photographer Tamara Abdul Hadi revisits the Iraqi Marshes, layering her own images, family archives, and crowdsourced photographs over a colonial-era photo book that once defined the region in the global imagination. Her project develops a decolonial vision of a landscape central to Iraq's cultural identity and to her own. Tamara was the JHI's 2024-25 Artist in Residence.

View some of Tamara's photos on the Doris McCarthy Gallery website.

Indigenous history is not a side story but the foundation of how we understand the past. Aroha Harris explains why all history is Indigenous history, and how Māori ways of thinking about time, place, and connection can reshape our shared future. Her perspective highlights how Indigenous approaches open up new possibilities for history and for how we relate to one another today. Aroha was the JHI's 2024-25 Distinguished Visiting Indigenous Faculty Fellow.

In this last episode of Series 1 of Humanities at Large, Kamari Maxine Clarke joins host Melissa Gismondi for a discussion about Clarke's work on absences in historical knowledge and archives, particularly in the context of Black and Indigenous lives. They explore Clarke's interest in documenting and making visible forms of knowledge and memory that are often rendered invisible or unintelligible, such as oral histories, stories, and everyday experiences. She advocates for more interdisciplinary and imaginative approaches to exploring knowledge and social memory, including the use of "critical fabulation" to fill in gaps in the historical record. She also discusses her work analyzing the use of satellite imagery and other technologies to document human rights abuses, noting the limitations of these tools in capturing the deeper structural and historical contexts of violence. Kamari Maxine Clarke was one of the JHI's 2023-24 Faculty Research Fellows and her research project examined the problem of absence-presence in the Black Atlantic World.

Olivia Shortt is a classically trained saxophonist and multi-disciplinary artist known for their bright, bold performance attire, experimental music and immersive experiences that invite the audience to interpret and engage with the art. In this conversation with host Melissa Gismondi, Shortt talks about the rematriation/repatriation of Indigenous artifacts as well their diverse influences—from an exploration of the "weird" to Meatloaf to Indigenous trickster figures. As the JHI's 2023-24 Artist in Residence, Shortt worked on an immersive opera focusing on the rematriation/repatriation of cultural objects and ancestors as well as the conversation between institutions and Indigenous communities. Shortt's work aims to create spaces for dialogue and reflection on the historical and ongoing impact of colonialism and efforts to reclaim Indigenous histories and identities.