New Orleans as Method: Where Theory Meets Practice Through Lived Experience

 In Winter Quarter 2026, Professor and interdisciplinary artist Jessica Monette led New Orleans as Method: Time, Tradition, and the Art of Black Cultural Production, an interdisciplinary course that positions New Orleans as a living archive. Rooted in Black Studies, visual art, and community-engaged learning, the course uses New Orleans as a method for understanding how culture is produced, sustained, and remembered—through time, through tradition, and through lived experience.

Through engagement with a range of Black literary scholarship, including In the Wake by Christina Sharpe, The Sovereignty of Quiet by Kevin Quashie, and Art on My Mind by bell hooks,students explored key concepts including “wake work,” interiority, and the ethics of representation. These frameworks guided their understanding of New Orleans not simply as a geographic location, but as a site where histories of systemic subjugation, radical resistance, and cultural brilliance converge.

Art-making functioned as a core method of inquiry throughout the course. Students maintained art journals and engaged in collage as a way to process course materials, using visual language to connect theoretical frameworks with their own lived experiences. Through this process, they came to understand art not only as expression, but as a tool for thinking, one capable of holding complexity, contradiction, and meaning beyond the limits of language.

Supported by a grant from the Center for Teaching and Learning, the course extended beyond the classroom during Spring Break, when 11 students accompanied Professor Monette to New Orleans for an immersive, on-the-ground learning experience. The trip transformed the course into a lived environment, where students engaged directly with the cultural institutions, artists, and community spaces that sustain the city’s traditions.

Students visited sites such as the Community Book Center, Congo Square, Dancing Grounds-a space dedicated to dance as cultural practice and social change- and the House of Dance and Feathers, founded by culture bearer Ronald T. Lewis and maintained by Charlotte Lewis. At the House of Dance and Feathers in particular, students encountered a living archive of Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, Skull and Bone Gang traditions, and Blacl Masking Indian suits, alongside a rich collection of community-donated cultural artifacts. Each site offered an opportunity to engage directly with practices of cultural preservation and stewardship.

Beyond institutional visits, students encountered the city through its ongoing cultural expressions. They experienced live jazz and engaged personally with renowned drummer Herlin Riley at the historic Pontchartrain Hotel, gaining insight into the improvisational and communal nature of the music. They attended a second line procession and spent time in spaces where rhythm, movement, and ritual function as forms of collective memory.

As Professor Monette reflected, “the students went from studying the origins of second line traditions in New Orleans to becoming the second line. That kind of knowledge and experience lives in the body and informs a certain way of knowing that can only be discovered by doing.” This shift, from observation to participation, marked a critical turning point in the learning process, as students began to embody the very traditions they had been studying.

Throughout the trip, students continued their journaling and collage practices, using them as tools to navigate and synthesize their experiences. Collage became a site of inquiry, allowing students to connect their personal histories with the cultural frameworks of New Orleans. In this way, art functioned as a container—holding what could not always be fully articulated in words, while making space for reflection, questioning, and transformation.

The course culminated in Spring Quarter with the exhibition New Orleans as Method: A Living Archive, held in the new Department of African and African American Studies (DAAAS) building at Stanford. The exhibition transformed the auditorium into an immersive environment that echoed the spirit of New Orleans itself. The space was filled with the sounds of New Orleans music, while images from the trip were projected across a large screen, creating a visual rhythm of memory, movement, and place.

Eleven large-scale collage works, one from each student, lined the walls of the auditorium, accompanied by their journals, forming a layered and intimate portrait of their experiences. The works reflected a range of interpretations, each mapping connections between New Orleans and the students’ own identities, histories, and cultural frameworks. Together, they formed a collective archive, one that was both deeply personal and expansively communal.

The exhibition was further activated through the presence of New Orleans cuisine, inviting guests to engage not only visually and intellectually, but sensorially. Food, music, image, and object converged to create an environment that extended the course’s central premise: that culture is something lived, felt, and shared.

A highlight of the evening included a conversation with Black art collector and curator Isaiah M. Joyner, who accompanied the group during the trip. In dialogue with Professor Monette, Joyner reflected on the role of collecting as a practice of cultural preservation. The conversation opened into a panel-style exchange, with questions from the audience that invited deeper reflection on stewardship, responsibility, and the future of Black cultural production.

An interactive world map invited visitors to reflect on their own cultural inheritances, extending the exhibition into a participatory space of dialogue and exchange.

For Professor Monette, the course reaffirmed the transformative potential of experiential, interdisciplinary learning. While the readings provided a critical foundation, it was the act of being in relationship with place, with community, and with one another that allowed students to fully engage the material. The experience demonstrated that when students are invited to think critically, create intuitively, and participate fully, learning becomes embodied, shaping not only what they know, but how they come to understand themselves and the world around them.