PROPOSAL TYPE
Collaborative Conversation
SEEKING
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
RELATED TOPICS
- Archives
- Memory
- Social Justice
ABSTRACT
The Hungry River Collective’s Community Viewpoints session at the 2022 conference was so meaningful to us. We were very proud to be a part of the NCPH community.
The Hungry River Collective has an active upcoming year of community outreach. We are committed to a multi-year outreach to build a lasting family circle of care. The 2022-23 academic years is a first step to cultivate descendant and community leader awareness around the women in the photographs to initiate conversations about caring outcomes and community building next steps. We would love to chance to share our process and progress with the NCPH and receive continued feedback at next year’s conference — a chapter two of this year’s presentation.
DESCRIPTION
Hungry River Collective is a community of archival care and ethical responsibility dedicated to building a family, community circle around an unexplored collection of century-old, carefully named and dated photographs from inside NC’s segregated asylum. Our work is a slow, loving and question-driven journey to honor the people in the pictures and their stories. We seek community process as a prerequisite to access, memorialization, and meaning. How do we care for people who never gave consent, but whose needs are not recognized in frameworks that center “legal” rights? In what ways does a focus on listening change approaches to archival stewardship? How can multi-institutional collaboration affect positive outcomes in archival and creative practices? We are a case study for a different kind of archival social practice: a multi-pronged approach built by genealogy, community engagement, and creative response — all of which strive to transcend simply cataloging photographs.
Our session would center the questions we encounter in this multi-year process and ask those questions of the NCPH community. Our next year includes our descendant dinners, a programmed zoom series for stakeholders, and developing a proposal for next steps to present to our developing family circle, as well as an NEA funded gathering of descendants and artists to begin thinking about how to build a creative response archive. We would love to share our findings, our process and our questions with the NCPH community.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Tift Merritt, Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, [email protected]
ALL FEEDBACK AND OFFERS OF ASSISTANCE SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY JULY 7, 2022. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.