Black Lives Next Door: Geographies of Inequity
Date
2024-04-10
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LYRASIS; Center for Mason Legacies
Abstract
The goal with our LYRASIS Catalyst Grant-funded project was to produce an innovative course and a wide range of public digital projects that would explore and critically engage with Black life, history, and spatial narratives in Northern Virginia, with the intention of pioneering an innovative course. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we aimed to foster a deeper understanding of Black geographies and develop antiracist methodologies within academia while fostering a reconsideration of space in storytelling.
Description
Our faculty members are glad to have received a Catalyst Grant from the LYRASIS Foundation, which will enable us to create an innovative course and fund public digital projects related to learning. As a result of the grant from LYRASIS we were able to establish our first partnership between university libraries, faculty, undergraduates, Master's candidates, and local archives as a result of the grant. LYRASIS was a research project that incorporated interdisciplinary "onto epistemological" investigative tools to reconsider the meanings of space in storytelling. A central question framed each stage of student discovery: How do our inquiries care critically for Black life in our society? The outcomes of this study were influenced by four antiracist methodologies: geospatial visual technology, Black digital humanities, critical library studies, and Black feminist praxis. These frameworks have also been used to shape our new course, "Black Lives Next Door." The multivalent methodology we deploy remains based on four fundamental principles. Firstly, antiracist teaching and learning is a dynamic process that does not have a predetermined endpoint. Second, there is a severe need for an interpersonal approach that encourages researchers, educators, and socially conscious activists to sustain a deeper conversation with one another. Third, the opportunities we intend to provide will equip students with skills enabling them to identify how racial inequity jeopardizes marginalized people enduring de jure and de facto discrimination. Finally, as a culmination of our methodology, we have re-envisioned the idea of redress and repair as the result of historical inquiry that reconstructs suppressed pasts as a part of the redress process. To promote these four principles, we will encourage our students to challenge master narratives, interrogate the integrity of archives, and map the geographies of accommodation and resistance to challenge master narratives.
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Citation
Oberle III, George D.; Scott, Wendi Manuel. "Black Lives Next Door: Geographies of Inequity." 4/10/2024, 1-13. DOI:10.48609/rtst-6992