Living Study Intro
undulating observations conducted and remembered by
A. Alfie Chambers
This is a living study.
A Study of Black Ecologies for a young person in an aging world.
Video was shot by Adenike Amin (2015)
Header photo was taken on film by my heart, 4year old Matilda :) (2024)
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Audre Lorde, Lyall Watson, Steward Pickett, Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Gay Walley, Viktor Schauberger, Rudolph Steiner, Maya Angelou, Science of the Sustainable City, JT Roane, Nathan Hare, Martin Luther King Jr, GOD, Alfreda, Mary, Matilda Machioli..
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Audre Lorde, Lyall Watson, Steward Pickett, Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Gay Walley, Viktor Schauberger, Rudolph Steiner, Maya Angelou, Science of the Sustainable City, JT Roane, Nathan Hare, Martin Luther King Jr, GOD, Alfreda, Mary, Matilda Machioli..
Author with k-3rd students during the forest school at windsor hill (2024), introducing pollinators: honeybees and carpenter-bees.
(Bees generously sourced from the Bee Lab, MD)
Lately, I’m still reading “The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins by Antero Pietila.
It is a handmaiden in my understanding of my city, Baltimore. That alongside Kondwani Fidel’s anthologies, shapes my mind in right angles to approach this home of mind with a new lens, and raw certainty that many things have stayed the same, and much must change.
It has also connected the dots as to why I am pulled to the University et al. How penetrating it would be for a woman of my heritage, my locus of focus, at this time to utilize the brand that is always on trend. For synrgy.
Concluding, I’m placing my observations on this journey of arrival to Ph.D into a journal you can find on the next pages. I will be coalescing studies and opportunities that make up urban ecosystems in order to deliver useful educational tools for the future.
All of this is taking place while we participate in end of something that refuses to die. And collectively, we will witness horrors through this medium, we will be forever forged into a global locus that has us stressed, distracted, traumatized, yet aware and empowered in solidarity with the soul cries of the bombed and starved who remind us, at any moment, this too will be your reality, live from zAg-A-ZiG.
I think it’s beyond asking each other “wHat ShOULd wE dO?!”, we’re in a spin cycle, back to questioning “ What are you willing to stop doing?”.
In 1965, James Baldwin wrote: “For history is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are consciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations…’’
(2025)
