Dr. Fadeke Castor was recently selected to the prestigious Crossroads Fellowship, a project that supports scholarly, artistic, activist, and religious work addressing Black religious experiences in a broad geographic range, including locations in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa.
Dr. Castor’s project, Digital Ancestral Altars, will create a digital multi-modal repository and archive to commemorate Trinidad’s ancestral Ifá/Orisha elders. The developed website will be the public facing part of the archive and connect members of the transnational Yorùbá Ìṣẹ̀ṣe L’àgbà (traditional religion/culture) community. In recent years many of Trinidad’s Ifá/Orisha elders have passed into the ancestral realm. This informs the urgency of this project as our communities continue to have our elders move on. There is no one place where digital media from their lives, including interviews and ritual moments, can be readily accessed by community members spreading out across the diaspora. Digital Ancestral Altars is positioned in this gap with a vision of expanding over phases to involve a wider swathe of the community and digitally enshrine more elders.
Read the announcement here, and learn more about Dr. Castor’s project here.
