Roopika Risam
H-index:
12
My sub-48 hour trip to the West Coast completely wrecked me but I will summon my energy to moderate Shonda’s book launch event and then go home and do absolutely nothing… til tomorrow when I need to edit an intro and write a conclusion for a volume and clean soooo much data. No rest for the wicked.
I gave my childhood a completely absurd list of suggestions for our trip to celebrate our 45th birthdays next year (like “Greenland!”) and so far the only one she outright rejected is Ibiza 🤣
Got to do a little q&a for the Shondaland website! Celebrating the launch of the Year of Yes, 10th anniversary edition by hosting a q&a with Shonda tomorrow at Dartmouth! (assuming I get home from LA....) www.shondaland.com/shonda/year-...
The Yes Questionnaire: Roopika Risam
Ahead of the Dartmouth stop on Shonda Rhimes’ book tour, the chair of the college’s film and media studies department speaks to the underrated power of an unambitious, nonstrategic Yes.
www.shondaland.com
Promotion dossier is in. Now to try to forget about it for the next six months... 🤢
Got to have dinner with a collaborator I've been working on a course for eLaboratories with for two years but have never met, and he brought a friend, and it was an incredible Desi extravaganza. ❤️
Ah we have reached the “beloved says ‘worst case you already have all your materials if you get denied and have to try again’” phase of promotion dossier preparation.
Reposted by Roopika Risam
DH as critical praxis and worldbuilding with @laurenfklein.bsky.social and @roopikarisam.bsky.social. An intellectual-pedagogical-feminist dream symposia come true through, hosted through my Critical Data Lab at UCLA Data X. datax.ucla.edu/news-events/...
On one of the few flights out of Boston that isn’t delayed or canceled because of the nor’easter. Next stop, LAX for the world’s shortest trip to the other side of the country - less than 48 hours. ✈️
When Past Roopsi was failing geometry and wondering why anyone would care, she could never have imagined that Future Roopsi would be writing an email about having found a workaround to a polygon problem (mapping, y'all, it turns out...).
Have now spent a truly horrifying amount of money on Getty Images for two projects because there isn't enough in the public domain due to the time period I'm working with. And that's with figuring out you can get much cheaper licenses suitable for a DH project if you use the custom rights feature.
The two and a half hours are totally worth it for the last scene.
It turns out they are two different movies! They were also both up for best picture the same year and I have no idea how There Will Be Blood didn’t win.
I watched the other movie. There was blood. And oil. And Daniel Day Lewis. Definitely not the same film! That last scene, wow.
There is something truly perverse about having to pay Getty Images $146 to licenses a photo of Amy Ashwood Garvey at the Fifth Pan-African Congress. Truly perverse.
The polishing deck chairs on the Titanic of my promotion dossier (which is itself done but I have so much work to do on one project to make sure it’s ready) was just having a whole conversation with my beloved about whether it’s the Pan-African Data Project or The Pan-African Data Project.
I sort of live by, make them feel like it was their idea and more flies with honey than vinegar (though do I want flies, really?).
Definitely. It’s more fun too. One of my mentors would up at a point in her career where she figured out that she wanted to be, in her words, a doula for other people’s work and now I get it.
Early 2010s Roopsi… had opinions. And didn’t always know the best way to communicate them.
The early days of DH, before I learned more tactful and effective ways of saying what I really think were a joy for none, least of all for me!
Having now redone my CV, due to new guidelines, which required going through every single thing I’ve done over 12 years, it strikes me how much my career has depended on people who gave me chances despite little evidence that it was actually a good idea. Perhaps they regret that.
It's amazing the kind of stuff you find written about you when you are trying to make sure you didn't miss anything for the "media appearances" section of your CV.
