David Vail, Assistant Professor, Kansas State University
Proposal Type: Structured Conversation
Seeking: Additional Presenters
Abstract: Looking at how rural places offer crucial opportunities to historians and humanities scholars to make their projects and practices more democratic toward an ever inclusive public history landscape.
Seeking: “Challenging an exclusive past” starts local, highlights region, and promotes a healthy civic life. Throughout Kansas, public history efforts are increasingly participatory, collaborative in scope, and have multiple applications for the state and region. Many of these efforts consist of taking a “field view,” which merges agricultural and natural resources history with preserving local archival collections, oral history interviews, and humanities programming. Rural places offer crucial opportunities to historians and humanities scholars to make their projects and practices more democratic toward an ever inclusive public history landscape. A survey of recent case studies in Kansas will show how taking a field view challenges an exclusive past by making history usable, encourages scholars and community members to take an “artifact’s eye view,” and fosters long term community participation in preserving and promoting local history.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to share contact information for other people the proposer should reach out to, please get in contact directly: David Vail,ddvail[at]ksu.edu
If you have general ideas or feedback to share please feel free to use the comments feature below.
All feedback, and offers of assistance, should be submitted by July 3, 2015.
Related Topics: Archives, Civic Engagement, Environment, Place
I have a particular, unrequited love for working lands preservation, and I wonder if you’d consider bringing in some folks who don’t know they are public historians –for example, people from land trusts who are coming up with creative ways to save working lands by training a new generation of farmers. You might also contact the folks at the Accokeek Foundation at Piscataway Park in PG County. They have operated both a living history colonial farm AND an organic farm that provides CSA Shares for quite a long time.