My next project brings ethnographically grounded Black Feminist theorizations to the study of religion to envision and inform new ways of belonging. I ask, how do people’s cosmologies and spiritual ontologies inform their building of community and visions of a liberated future? I locate my response to this question at the intersection of Black sacred practices, marronage, and fugitivity. This project works to illuminate the freedom codes of marronage that have always already been through exploration of collective spiritual praxis across several African diasporic and Afro-Indigenous communities. I offer that we consider recognizing those people and communities whose ways of being both ask (and answer) important questions such as: What does it mean for our methodologies, our theories, our politics, and our ways of living together in community if we were to center Spirit as manifest in all living things (including the Earth)? And what are the implications of taking seriously intangible energies and powers that we are in constant relation with? Ultimately, this work explores the ways in which African/Indigenous inspired religious cosmologies and spiritual ontologies shift our subjectivities and ways of knowing. In doing so, I propose to map practices and performances that can create quilombolas, clearings, and hush harbors where we can imagine and build our liberated past/present/futures.

Digital Ancestral Altars: Remembrances of Trinidad Ifá/Orisha Elders creates a digital multi-modal repository and archive to commemorate Trinidad’s ancestral Ifá/Orisha elders. The developed website will be the public facing part of the archive and connect members of the transnational Yorùbá Ìṣẹ̀ṣe L’àgbà (traditional religion/culture) community. In recent years many of Trinidad’s Ifá/Orisha elders have passed into the ancestral realm. This informs the urgency of this project as our communities continue to have our elders move on. There is no one place where digital media from their lives, including interviews and ritual moments, can be readily accessed by community members spreading out across the diaspora. Digital Ancestral Altars is positioned in this gap with a vision of expanding over phases to involve a wider swathe of the community and digitally enshrine more elders. Initial content for the website will make accessible to the global Ìṣẹ̀ṣe community specific ethnographic materials from Dr. Castor’s Trinidad Ethnographic Archive. As the project develops it will incorporate shared contributions from the Ìṣẹ̀ṣe community. Ultimately, this project will document and memorialize Ìṣẹ̀ṣe elders, while also contributing to conversations on digital Black religions, spiritual praxis, transnational religious communities and the construction of the African diaspora.