Reframing crisis: Hope and future-making in contemporary Cuban photographs
| dc.contributor.author | Smith, Graydon | |
| dc.contributor.supervisor | Boudreault-Fournier, Alexandrine | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-09-09T19:31:36Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-09-09T19:31:36Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024 | |
| dc.degree.department | Department of Anthropology | |
| dc.degree.level | Master of Arts MA | |
| dc.description.abstract | Following the COVID-19 pandemic, already challenging circumstances in Cuba have significantly worsened, heavily impacting how Cubans envision their lives and futures. Using a combination of visual and ethnographic methods, I conducted two months of fieldwork in the summer of 2023 in Cuba’s second largest city, Santiago de Cuba. Using photovoice, photowalks, and semi-structured interviews with eight Cuban young adults, I visually explore life following the worst economic crisis in the island’s history. Following COVID-19, an already fraught political climate has further devolved, migration has reached historic rates, inflation renders many goods unobtainable, and infrastructure and services are challenged. For many, future paths are unclear; they may seek better lives abroad, or fight to improve their conditions on the island, in a tumultuous and polarized political climate. For youth, migration often appears more viable to catalyze change. I employ the theory of radical hope to consider how people produce meaning and futural momentum despite tremendous pressure and uncertainty. Curating images into five key themes, I consider discourses of migration, loss, change, escape, and survival during difficult times. As I argue, these photographs inform a non-generalizable, nuanced image of life during crises, highlighting sustaining moments alongside threats to hope. This centers a more dignified view of life, emphasizing momentum rather than fatalism, individual agency, and the possibility for change without prescribing future paths. By emphasizing possibility alongside critique, I raise questions about these indeterminate trajectories and the role of hope in a seemingly hopeless time, finding that a portrait of contemporary Cuban lives and futures are difficult to characterize with pre-existing ideas. | |
| dc.description.scholarlevel | Graduate | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1828/20393 | |
| dc.language | English | eng |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.rights | Available to the World Wide Web | |
| dc.subject | Anthropology | |
| dc.subject | Cuba | |
| dc.subject | Visual | |
| dc.subject | Photography | |
| dc.subject | Cultural Anthropology | |
| dc.subject | Arts | |
| dc.subject | Hope | |
| dc.subject | Future | |
| dc.subject | Crisis | |
| dc.subject | Photovoice | |
| dc.subject | Santiago de Cuba | |
| dc.subject | Migration | |
| dc.title | Reframing crisis: Hope and future-making in contemporary Cuban photographs | |
| dc.type | Thesis |