Artemis Saleh – Interdisciplinary Researcher | Intersectional Strategist & Analyst

Interdisciplinary Researcher | Intersectional Strategist & Analyst | Writer

I am a linguistic and media anthropologist with a focus on digital spaces and computational methods. My background is in historical ethnology, African studies, Romance studies, and cognitive linguistics at Goethe-University Frankfurt. In 2018, I carried out a research project in Lagos, Nigeria within the Nigerian comics industry that focused on formal semantics of pictorial narratives, the ethnographic encounter, and the historicity of comics. Since 2021, I am a PhD candidate within the international research project “Cultural Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Africa and Asia” (CEDITRAA), which investigates the new world order of cultural production. In that context, my dissertation titled “The re-invention of womxn? Queer(ing) Nigerian media and doing #relatable research” has centered the counter-hegemonic media flows embodied by queer and trans Nigerian media producers and their media productions. In this study, I have designed an intersectional and relational approach to ethnographic research and combined this methodology with computational methods such as topic modeling with BERTopic in Python. Since I handed in my dissertation, I am currently working on a project at the intersection of African computational studies and African linguistics at the African Music Archives (AMA) in Mainz.

My areas of focus

Relational ethnographic research methods

The method of ethnography has been used widely across multiple disciplines and areas of research. However, the dynamics of ethnographic research continue to remain rooted in colonial continuities. Here I am interested how the concept of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989) together with the concept of positioned professionalism (Mai 2020) provide significant tools for the calibration of power and global entanglements during research.

Computational methods in qualitative research

General linguistics as well as the humanities have entered the digital era and have implemented computational methods into their research. However, in African linguistics these tools have not yet been examined. Likewise, the typological and technological implications by African languages are vastly glossed over in language-related technological studies. Therefore, I am interested in the cross-disciplinary investigation of African languages, computational methodology and qualitative research.

Archival embodiment

The rejection of the body-mind binary (Oyěwùmí 1997), a conceptual distinction that persists in European academic epistemology, and the adoption of an understanding of the situatedness of knowledge residing in everyday/everynight experiences (Collins 1997), corresponds with the position of pedagogical scholars, that highlight the involvement of the teacher’s body in the educational process (Akbaba 2023; hooks 1994). Therefore, the body cannot be merely conceptualized as a vehicle for intellectual knowledge, as this would perpetuate the separation of the body and the mind. The body is regarded as archival in nature; it establishes the basis for experiences and the retrieval of knowledge. Furthermore, it is living and lived throughout the process of archiving. Here, I investigate how such embodied archival entries can be accessed via relational rage (Rosaldo 1984).

Queer African studies

Beyond queer theory and queer studies centering the so-called “Global North,” from the perspective of queer African studies, the term queer has yet to be defined clearly (Nyanzi 2014); and intentionally so (Matebeni & Pereira 2014). In that context, the term is per definition not intended to eventually serve as a binarized term, ultimately categorizing what and who is queer or not (Nyanzi 2014), but rather to bear a potent spectrum encompassing unknowability, surprise, wonder, discovery, fluidity and livability (Macharia 2015: 142) within the context of human relationality. Here, I investigate how, for instance, Afri-queer fugitivity (Green-Simms 2022) is theorized and practiced in queer and trans Nigerian media productions.