Projects – Reckonings Summer Institute 2023

Reckonings: An Experiential Learning Syllabus

The purpose of this project is to develop a syllabus for an experiential learning course at the undergraduate level that involves undergraduates applying theoretical knowledge to fieldwork. Specifically, the project will entail learning how to enlist digital resources in archiving community histories so that these techniques can then be applied in a classroom setting that focuses on local community-based memory projects. The goals include learning how to integrate specific experiential learning objectives into the course syllabus, developing partnerships with local organizations, constructing projects involving fieldwork, and learning innovative digital preservation techniques. The course, The Rhetoric of Public Memory, is currently undergoing the processes required for of approval.

Reparative Community Heritage Archive Toolkit

For the Reckonings Summer Institute, we hope to outline a model toolkit that community organizations could use to develop their own digital heritage archive. Our toolkit will include modules developed to 1) address community and university perspectives, 2) model the process of building a digital archive from start to finish, and 3) share our deep reflection and experience on what makes an equitable, mutually beneficial, reparative, and sustainable community/university collaboration. Topics would include community goal-setting, research techniques to discover untold stories, cultural competence training for university faculty and students, community digitization workshops, archival backpack visits, user-friendly ingest utility, oral history training, design for effective community/university collaborative projects, metadata recording and control, capacity building for equitable practices and technical skills, exhibition and research platforms, archival policy decision-making, managing permissions, access, ownership, and control, and minimal computing techniques for access and maintenance of a community digital archive.

Both Sides of the Wall: Empowering Incarcerated Families through Healing & Wellness

This public history project is a multiyear project that is focused on eliminating the stress and trauma of families who experience generational incarceration. By focusing on addressing the stress and trauma of familial incarceration, we aim to empower BIPOC communities and residents in the preservation, creation, and curation of their community histories. Understanding the relationship between trauma, stress, and the physical body is essential to optimal health, wellbeing, and happiness. In urban communities, physical trauma and psychological prevalence are even higher due to many environmental and cultural factors. These factors include but are not limited to poverty, social inequality, unemployment, caregiving and custody concerns. Additionally, parent-child separation, poor academic performance, high risk of juvenile delinquency, and substance abuse are factors associated with stress and trauma of incarcerated families. One Circle Health and Wellness offers services to educate, empower, and strengthen the social, emotional, and cultural well-being of individuals and families in urban communities.

Tying the Kaleesu: Africano Waltham’s Co-production of Cultural Heritage

The kaleesu, a wrapper often made of colorful machine cloth widely used in Eastern Africa, is a symbol of cultural knowledge transmission. Known as kanga in Kenya , Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Comoros islands, leesus hold stories connected to different stages of women’s lives in East African communities (birth, initiations, weddings, and funerals). They are central to rites of passage that mark men and women’s passage to adulthood. Women tie it around their bodies in different shapes; use it to swaddle newborn babies or carry them on their backs. In journeys, leesus are versatile blankets that can be used to make bundles that carry one’s extra luggage. It is this symbolic meaning of the kaleesu in journeying and carrying that informs our archiving of cultural heritage transmission in the transnational and transcultural lives of Ugandans in Waltham. Our project frames cultural heritage as a transgenerational transmission of kaleesu tying: a creative remixing of Ugandan women elders personal memories of their lives in Uganda and stories of making home in Waltham. Our digital archive mirrors the leesu bundles to contain how grandmothers have reinvented kitobero, a mixture of storytelling, dance, food, and clothing to teach aspects of Baganda culture to their children and grandchildren. “Tying the Kaleesu,” seeks to document how Ugandans negotiate belonging and conceive of cultural heritage transmission as a means for the wider Boston and New England community to learn about who we are.

Caminos de Esperanza/Pathways of Hope

This project focuses on unaccompanied immigrant youths residing in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Mostly Central American and more specifically, Guatemalan, unaccompanied youths have been arriving and enrolling into the local schools but have found insufficient supports. They are underserved and are often unable to receive basic services including obtaining library cards, medical and behavioral health services, nutritious foods and safe housing, as well as empowering academic and linguistic instruction. This digital storytelling project aims to support youths who wish to share their stories as well as to provide them with the digital tools to adequately represent their realities in their own voices. It is our and their hope that their stories can be used to garner better institutional supports in all aspects of their lives.

The Power of Our Stories: Testimonios from Boston’s Immigrant Women

“The Power of Our Stories: Testimonios from Boston’s Immigrant Women” is an oral history and digital archive project focused on a community of female immigrants, all members of the Dominican Development Center. We will ask them to share their stories of migration to the US and their experiences of leadership and activism in the community to support the rights of domestic workers in greater Boston. The project was originally conceived by Magalis Troncoso Lama, Executive Director of the DDC, as a way to bring greater visibility to the Spanish-speaking members of her organization and their history of grassroots activism to support immigrant workers throughout Massachusetts. Beginning this summer we will record and preserve these stories––or more precisely, testimonios––of Boston’s immigrant women workers by recording long-form interviews with 5–7 DDC members. We will share the audio materials gathered during these interviews in two edited forms: short videos of 8–10 minutes focused on a single member’s history, and then a longer edited narrative that includes more of the testimony shared by that member. As Troncoso Lama explains, “It is through greater visibility that we create social change and work against injustice. The way that we change the narrative of struggle for immigrants is to tell people what we are experiencing now.”

In the Tradition: Student leadership and Community Change

In partnership with Vanessa Silva, community member, Tony (Anthony) Van Der Meer, Senior Lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at University of Massachusetts Boston, seeks to contribute to the preservation and curation of a piece of history highlighting collaboration between local University students and community members from 1976-1980. The work was a catalyst for facilitating community resistance and systemic change in Boston. Professor Van Der Meer is in possession of flyers, news clippings and photos documenting social protest and cultural activism led by students and community members at that time. Mel King, Senator Bill Owens, Marlene Stephens, Sara Smalls, and Barbara Smith of the Combahee River Collective are local members engaged during this period. National figures like Queen Mother Moore, Ella Baker, and Yuri Kochiyama are among some of the people who also contributed to this movement. Alonzo Speight captured some of these activities in his documentary film, The People United. Through interviews, narratives, flyers, news clippings and photos, our desire is to awaken the legacy, co-creation and collaboration of student activists and community members in Boston and to inspire the need for continued unity among movement builders dedicated to creating democratic and liberatory spaces.

Rematriating the History of the Southwest Corridor Parkway

The vision of this project is to explore the hidden histories of Southwest Corridor Parkway by bringing longtime residents, visitors, scholars, and advocates together to share knowledge. This process will work to identify the untold or missing representations in various sources used to create content for educational signage along the Parkway. It is particularly important that community processes include decolonization efforts.

Critical Breakdown in Review

Critical Breakdown in Review is a collection of stories and interviews about one of Boston’s most memorable open-mics. Sivia Malloy and Kyara Andrade (DJ TROY Frost) aim to capture the history of Critical Breakdown and its impact on Boston’s Hip Hop Community in this archival project.

Our Stories/Nuestras Historias: Intergenerational Storytelling in Codman Square

Students in Northeastern University (NU) first-year and advanced writing courses will partner with older adults at LBFE Boston partner site Operation P.E.A.C.E.’s Dorchester Senior Center to record, produce and archive oral histories. This will dovetail with LBFE Boston and Operation P.E.A.C.E’s missions to provide social connection and enrichment programs for BIPOC-identifying older adults in under-resourced communities. All participants will share in the work of shaping narratives and technical production. Older adults will have new opportunities to share their knowledge and grow their digital literacy, and university students will learn the principles and practices of ethical, inclusive storytelling and digital production. Recorded histories may be archived publicly and/or shared as part of the storytellers’ legacies to their circles of care.

Community Story-Telling for Social Change

The course will be offered through the Merrimack College Master’s Program in Community Engagement in partnership with Neighbors in Need. It will be a 5000-level course which will also be available to students in other graduate programs as well as advanced standing undergraduate students (Double Warriors). The Community Engagement Program is a 36-credit degree program focused on community work that is grounded in a strengths-based, social change lens. The program is currently entering its thirteenth year and includes a service-based fellowship component involving many long-standing community partnerships. The course will be a wonderful complement to existing core required courses and electives such as Community Engagement: Theory and Practice; Research; and Diversity, Equity, and Social Justice in Community Engagement.

Isaura Oliveira: Raízes Culturais E Espíritos

The project aims to organize and archive documentation of over 40 years of Mestra Isaura’s artistic work on her African-Brazilian dance culture which has become art activism. The goal of this archive is to illustrate Mestra Isaura’s methodology of teaching, storytelling, creating performances and rituals of her community and soloist performances. We strive to innovate

The Dollmakers: Black American Doll Artists In Their Own Words

The National Black Doll Museum is working to collect the true stories of African American doll artists, especially elders, and to additionally document examples of these artists at work, providing insight into their craft and their creative process for posterity. These interviews will be digitalized for viewing and listening via the Museum’s emerging online archive