PROPOSAL TYPE
Roundtable
SEEKING
- Seeking Additional Presenters
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
RELATED TOPICS
- Material Culture
- Preservation
- Public Engagemet
ABSTRACT
This session will present and discuss several projects that are deeply rooted in community-centered work. It will highlight projects that are:
- Prioritizing collaboration work that amplifies the voices of community members.
- Using public history to catalyze community development.
- Demonstrating how public historians engage with communities in meaningful ways.
DESCRIPTION
For this roundtable, we are seeking 1-3 additional panelists. Panelists will share stories developing community-centered projects that create connections and strengthen community well-being through public history. They’ll share lessons learned and pose questions about approaches to further development their projects. The organizers will then facilitate a discussion with the audience, using these presentations as a jumping off point. The goal is to provide a safe, generative discussion space for those who are or want to help communities reveal their authentic histories.
The proposal organizers, Gupta and Wickens, will be two of the panelists. We’re cultural heritage conservators whose conservation practice centers public history principles. We’ll discuss The Community Conservator Project, which is still in early stages of development. The project builds a network of community conservators embedded in community-centered institutions (libraries, community centers, historical societies) working with the public to preserve personal and community heritage. Conservators traditionally work either for institutional collections or in private practice, often constrained by profit needs. This project takes conservators beyond this framework into publicly accessible spaces where they are employed by the host institution but organize programs, teach conservation techniques, and provide preservation guidance for the public at no cost. Through this work, communities will have access to new knowledge and skills to preserve their own cultural heritage. Community conservators will also learn techniques from community members who are already doing conserving work. This give-and-take will help build solidarity with communities, amplify their work, and help community members and conservators alike see themselves as public historians.
As our program is in the early stages of development, we particularly welcome panelist projects at other stages of development, from in-progress to fully developed.
We’d love to hear from people who:
- Developed/are developing a project that demonstrates how public historians engage meaningfully with communities
- Prioritize collaborations that amplifies community member voices
- Work(ed) on projects where public history catalyzes community developmentIf you’re unsure whether your project fits our program, we’d still love to hear from you. We’d also appreciate any feedback on this proposal.
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: Anisha Gupta, [email protected]
ALL FEEDBACK AND OFFERS OF ASSISTANCE SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY JULY 10, 2024. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
Hello,
I’m an archivist at Chicago Public Library Special Collections (https://www.chipublib.org/special-collections/). My colleagues and I have been working on a multi-year project to mount the exhibit Akito Tsuda: Pilsen Days (https://www.chipublib.org/news/exhibit-akito-tsuda-pilsen-days/). Akito Tsuda is a Japanese photographer who attended college in Chicago in the early 1990s. A photography class assignment had him traveling around Chicago. He encountered the Pilsen neighborhood, a predominantly Mexican American community, and over the next four years, he captured hundreds of intimate portraits of the people and environment. He returned to Japan in 1994 and the photos sat in storage for 20 years. Then, in 2014, he began posting them on social media and reconnecting with the people in the photos and the community of Pilsen. In 2021, Chicago Public Library purchased 118 of the images and made them part of our Special Collections. Then, through funding from the Terra Foundation for American Art, we began a multi-year process to engage with the community and ultimately mount an exhibition of the photographs. Among the initiatives related to the project was a visit in 2022 by Akito during which interviews between him and the subjects in his photographs and their families were recorded. Those interviews have since been made part of the archive and are open for research (https://www.chipublib.org/akito-tsuda-pilsen-days-audio-recording-transcripts-archival-collection/). Other programming has been put on to promote the exhibit and provide ways for the community to connect with the photos, with Akito, with the history of Pilsen at this time, and to help continue to create the archive. We think our project would make a good fit for your proposal topic and are interested in being co-panelists. Happy to talk more. Thanks!
-Johanna
Hello there! I am the archivist at the Hagen History Center in Erie, PA, a city deep in the Rust Belt. We are the largest museum in the quad county region that includes NW PA, NE Ohio, and SW New York. This area boasts no fewer than two dozen local historical societies, all primarily volunteer run (I am on the board for one of them). We have taken on the responsibility to connect with these local historical societies and help them succeed. We are still planning ways on how to do this, including giving them exhibit space in our museum, but some things we have already done is run workshops, held genealogy events, and most recently offer personal training to a brand-new organization hoping to build their collections and database. We have been conscious as to not talk “at” anyone, as we are aware many of these people have been doing public history longer than we have, however, we are keen on strengthening our connection with these organizations and be a leader in the field. We have also taken this opportunity to hear from members of these organizations and build personal relationships. A stronger network of local historical societies makes all of us better practitioners. There is still some development going on, but if this concept is something of interest to you, please get in touch!