Wednesdays – 4 – 6:30pm (online) – Prof. Nicole King – nking@umbc.edu w/ community fellow Curtis Eaddy of the Southwest Partnership
AMST 422/682 is a public humanities seminar where students develop a preservation project on the overlooked history of a Baltimore neighborhood. As part of the Baltimore Traces: Communities in Transition project students will explore the city’s social history with a focus on the southwest neighborhood of Poppleton. Poppleton’s history is a case study exploring the ravages of urban renewal, highway construction, and redevelopment as well as the rich traditions of African American culture in West Baltimore.
This course will educate students in documenting and preserving cultural history through place-based research and oral history/ethnographic methods.
Bmore Historic 2020 will take place virtually on Friday, September 18. Register here!
What do we do at Bmore Historic?
Bmore Historic 2020 will be structured differently than previous yeats because we are holding the unconference virtually. Past, in-person unconferences have been structured around four session blocks: two in the morning and two in the afternoon. We usually have between four to six sessions in each of the time blocks for a total of twenty sessions throughout the day.
Here is our 2020 schedule:
9:00: Introduction to Bmore Historic 2020
9:05: Zoom Tips
9:10: Ice Breaker
9:20-10:05: Session 1: Nobody Wants to Go to Your Zoom Thing Anymore: Engaging Audiences in the Era of Coronavirus
5 minute break
10:10-11:00: Session 2: Ethics in Archiving
5 minute break
11:05-11:50: Session 3: Confederate Memorials and Columbus Monuments: What’s To Be Done?
The Oral History Association is proud to announce the release of its new suite of remote interviewing resources. These resources are a product of the COVID-19 pandemic and the requirement to cease face-to-face interviewing for the health of both narrator and interviewer. By March 2020, many of us found ourselves sheltering in place, trying to learn how to do our jobs from home. For those working in oral history, remote interviewing became a pathway to continue essential oral history work. This guide is meant to be a resource to practitioners as they work through the numerous questions that arise with this method.
Though the current environment requires us to set aside face-to-face interviewing, these resources are intended to inform our practice beyond the international crisis created by COVID-19. There are many reasons for in-person interviewing to be our default, but those who developed this guide feel that remote interviewing should have a place in our practice even when it is safe to resume meeting face to face.
The Oral History Association’s Remote Interviewing Resources Task Force developed these materials, including a decision tree, accompanying narrative, case studies, and recording platform documents. Neither the decision tree nor the case studies are intended to cover all available platforms; we have tried to include information on platforms that are currently seeing the most use in the profession. We will add more case studies and information on additional platforms over time. Further, as technology around remote interviewing develops and evolves, we will do our best to keep this guide up to date.
Task Force Members included Jen Cramer, Natalie Fousekis, Andy Kolovos, Rachel Mears, Sarah Milligan, Steven Sielaff, and Amy Starecheski, with chair Allison Tracy-Taylor. We relied on colleagues and in some instances our own programs to supply case studies, and we thank everyone who contributed for their time and expertise.
Black Yield Institute, along with Cherry Hill Development Corporation, Elev8 Baltimore, Raising InnerCity Hope (RICH), and Youth Resiliency Institute, manages and operates a food and resource distribution hub that supplies a monthly supply of food to 200 elders and families in Cherry Hill. We also supply goods to small businesses and nonprofits feeding people across Baltimore. Most food donations will be provided by a local foundation and others by emergency food efforts. Some food will be procured from Black farmers in the region and produced by BYI. Since March 14, we have collectively:
Provided 500 to 600 nutritional balanced meals per day (with support from Mera Kitchen Collective & Wilde Thyme)
Shared 200 total bags of activities and hygiene products
Shared over 5200 total meals.
Worked over 800 hours of service
Provided on-site and provided resources to other communities from West, East and South Baltimore
Procured 50 pounds of salad and brassicas from a local farm and harvested 30 pounds of collards from our farm, Cherry Hill Urban Community Garden
Distributed 10,000 pounds of fresh, frozen, and dried goods
Please feel free to donate to our work through PayPal (blackyieldinstitute@gmail.com) and CashApp and Venmo ($/@blackyield). Learn more or discuss other ways to support, like in-kind donations, by emailing Brother Eric at ejackson@blackyieldinstitute.org. The Black Yield Institute family really appreciates your consideration of monetary and/or in-kind donations and good vibes, prayers. Please share with others!
This call comes from Holden Warren, who has been working with Arabbers and with food justice efforts in Baltimore for years:
For over 200 years the Arabbers have been a trusted institution of Baltimore’s Black community, a population that has shown to be disproportionately impacted by the current Covid 19 virus. The Arabber Preservation Society wants to leverage this trust to prepare, protect and nourish the community. Starting Wed April 8th, Arabbers will be given training on the protective measures and basic PPE training, then in collaboration with Food Rescue Baltimore, will give away rescued food, cloth masks, gloves, reusable bags and corona virus information into the east and west side neighborhoods they normally service. Depending on the steadiness of food and supplies, we want to go out multiple times per week.
We are looking for donations of cloth masks, gloves, disinfectants, and reusable bags for distribution and money to support the Arabbers, horse, stable hands, and support staff.
More updates coming – to help reach out to Holden@arabbers.com or www.arabbers.com or www.foodrescuebaltimore.org
VISIT THESE SITES TO DONATE AND SUPPORT THIS WORK:
Holden Warren was in the Peace Corps in Tonga and later in Monrovia during the Ebola outbreak. He brings these experiences in public health education and inequities in our systems to addressing today’s current challenges. Holden and crew are organizing free food distribution with specific health education messaging for people on their routes.
Holden made a short film John & James (2018), an intimate portrait of the cross-cultural bond between Baltimore’s iconic Arabbers and a community of rural Pennsylvania Mennonites. United by a love of horses and decades of doing business at the New Holland auction, they finally break bread together.
We were in the process of organizing a showing and discussion of the film this spring at UMBC when the current pandemic hit. We are committed to bringing this programming back when we resume in-person activities on campus and develop the Baltimore Field School in 2021. However, during the current emergency, please share information and donate supplies or money to these organizations doing important work on the front lines in Baltimore.
Due to the Covid-19 emergency, the Baltimore Field School project team requested and received a one-year extension from Mellon on the project and plan to pause major work. The inaugural Baltimore Field School will be postponed until summer 2021.
As director of the Orser Center, Nicole King will continue to work on setting up the project’s website, studying similar summer institutes, and developing more resources on public humanities. Our wonderful Project Manager, Imani Spence, and King will remain in contact with our partners at Black Yield Institute and the Southwest Partnership. The project team hopes to resume some planning capacity this summer and we will convene a meeting of this group again at the start to the fall 2020 semester.
Here’s a brief overview of the project and our current partners on the Summer 2021 BALTIMORE FIELD SCHOOL:
The summer 2021 Baltimore Field School, a humanities-based training intensive, will create a framework for faculty and graduate students to collaborate with community organizations in developing methods for ethical research and teaching projects focused on public humanities in Baltimore. The project is supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The pilot Baltimore Field School will run for two weeks in summer 2021. All UMBC faculty and graduate students working in the humanities are eligible to apply. The field school will have approximately 12 participants from UMBC. Participants should be interested in publicly engaged research and programming in Baltimore. All field school participants will be paid a stipend of $3,000 and lunch will be provided during the field school summer institutes. The field school will be based at the CAHSS downtown classroom at the Lion Brothers Building in Southwest Baltimore, and participants will be working in the field in South and Southwest Baltimore.
PRIMARY FIELD SCHOOL PARTNERS
Eric Jackson and Black Yield Institute
Black Yield Institute is a Pan-African power institution based in Baltimore, Maryland, serving as a think tank and collective action network that addresses food apartheid. Since our beginning in November 2015, we have worked collaboratively with black people and entities, along with other institutions, in pursuit of Black land and food sovereignty. We are to build independent power by establishing an action network and serving as an incubator for ideas and projects. We are unapologetically a Black-led institution, utilizing Afrocentric, Pan-African, and human rights frameworks to anchor our thought and works toward liberation through food.
Eric Jackson is an organizer, educator, and filmmaker, humbly serving as the visionary and a co-founder of Black Yield Institute, committed to building a movement toward Black Land and Food Sovereignty in Baltimore. Currently, he and his team, are committed to a 1.25 acre urban agriculture operation and building a cooperatively-owned grocery store in South Baltimore, while also conducting Black-led research, facilitating political education, and organizing an action network. Eric has over a decade of experience working in and with communities operating programming and helping people to build power and address a myriad of issues, including food inequities. A Baltimore native from the Cherry Hill Community, Eric is the recipient of numerous awards and a public speaker who has presented hundreds of addresses and workshops to diverse groups about food sovereignty, building power, and establishing strong organizations to address complex social issues, specific to people of African Descent. He is affirmed in and secured this work through the love of his family and friends, especially the brilliance of his Queen, Diara, and four children, Oryan, Erian, Amir, & Kamau!
Curtis Eaddy and Southwest Partnership
TheSouthwest Partnership envisions an awesome, healthy, architecturally beautiful, diverse, cohesive community of choice built on mutual respect and shared responsibility. We embrace all diversity: from race, gender, and sexual orientation to economic, education, and housing choice. Our diversity is our strength. The Southwest Partnership aims to maintain this vision through productive land uses and partnerships that will maintain a cohesive community. We partner with our neighbors, surrounding communities, city government, area institutions, and businesses, knowing that when we take the right road together, and with integrity, everyone will benefit. The Southwest Partnership is a coalition of seven neighborhood associations and six anchor institutions in Southwest Baltimore. We work together to build awesome communities in the Southwest Partnership Area: the neighborhoods of Barre Circle, Franklin Square, Hollins Roundhouse, Mount Clare, Pigtown, Poppleton, and Union Square.
Curtis Eaddy was born in Baltimore and raised in Poppleton. He is a community artist and a Hip Hop DJ and Emcee, who has been programming events for more than ten-years. As a student at Frostburg State University, he founded an Arts & Entertainment campus-organization to provide diverse cultural events to unite a non-diverse college-community. After graduating, he returned to Baltimore and continued organizing for public events in Baltimore City Public Schools, and non-profit organizations (College Bound Foundation, Reginald F. Lewis Museum). His passion for community development brought him to the Southwest Partnership. His plan as Marketing and Events Manager is to identify opportunities for and develop new events to help bridge the disconnect between the neighborhoods in the community. Curtis is responsible for supporting and publicizing community events and marketing the Southwest Partnership and the neighborhoods.
Project Evaluator/Assessor
Dr. Tahira Mahdiis a community psychologist and consultant based in the Baltimore-Washington, DC region. Tahira develops and facilitates workshops and presentations for community programs, businesses, organizations, and college/university students and personnel regarding internal & external community matters, equity & diversity, and research & evaluation.
Questions or Thoughts? Email Nicole King nking@umbc.edu
UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) is pleased to announce the launch of a fourteen-month initiative to promote diversity, inclusion, and social justice in the public humanities, supported by a $125,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project, Strengthening UMBC’s Public Humanities Infrastructure: The Baltimore Field School, will create a framework for faculty to collaborate with community organizations in building ethical and sustainable research and teaching projects focused on public humanities.
King works with students Dawn Baskin and DeAndre Bright to get an informed consent form signed by Lonnie Combs as part of the A Walk Down West Baltimore Street project (spring 2019). –photo by Bill Shewbridge
A new view of public humanities
The Baltimore Field School is coordinated by UMBC’s Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community, and Culture and led by Nicole King, associate professor of American Studies and director of the Orser Center, and CAHSS Dean Scott Casper. It aims to advance UMBC’s humanistic scholarship and teaching, rooted in deep and meaningful engagement with communities and neighborhoods.
“We want to think differently about how public humanities work can be done by reflecting on what ethical community-university partnerships look like,” says King.
For more on the project, please read the full story HERE.
Thursday, October 11 From Exclusion to Inclusion: Rethinking Infrastructure to Bridge Baltimore’s Divides is a one-day symposium in Pigtown that traces the impact of policies and design practices that reinforced segregation and disparity in Baltimore — focusing on infrastructure like roads, streetscape, and transit — and envisions a better way forward for the MLK, Jr. Boulevard corridor. The symposium is followed by another event: an evening networking reception that serves as the exhibition opening. The reception is free and open to a broader audience.
This Friday, October 12 at noon, is the next Engaged Humanities Speaker Series at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Brett Stoudt, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, “Researching at the Community-University Borderlands: Using Public Science to Study Policing in the South Bronx” (Malone 107) Stoudt will present on the Morris Justice Project, a participatory action research (PAR) study in a South Bronx neighborhood of New York City designed to understand residents’ experiences with and attitudes towards the New York Police Department. He will describe how a set of participatory, research-action, “sidewalk science” strategies—grounded in community knowledge/expertise—helped to challenge the ongoing structural violence of the carceral state.
If you missed the release party for Baltimore Revisited at Red Emma’s or if you just want to keep celebrating, you are invited to join us on October 15 in Fine Arts 559 from 11:30am – 12:45pm for the UMBC Book Party… there’s a free TACO BAR and you can pick up the book
OCTOBER 15, 5:30 – 6:30 pm | Macksey Seminar Room, Brody Learning Commons “Black Queer Performance in Baltimore’s ‘Cathedral of Books’” by Joseph Plaster, Curator in Public Humanities at Johns Hopkins, presents on a collaborative project between Johns Hopkins and Baltimore’s ballroom community: the Peabody Ballroom Experience. Plaster screens a short film about the project and discusses community engaged work in light of historically exploitative relationships between the university and black Baltimore. More information about the event at https://hub.jhu.edu/events/2019/10/15/black-queer-performance-in-baltimores/
The Orser Center invites you to join us as we celebrate the release of a new anthology on the political and racial economy of urban life in Baltimore!
Event posted designed by John Duda, Red Emma’s, 2019
Nicknamed both “Mobtown” and “Charm City” and located on the border of the North and South, Baltimore is a city of contradictions. From media depictions in The Wire to the real-life trial of police officers for the murder of Freddie Gray, Baltimore has become a quintessential example of a struggling American city. Yet the truth about Baltimore is far more complicated—and more fascinating.
To help untangle these apparent paradoxes, the editors of Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City have assembled a collection including twenty-seven chapters and thirty experts from inside and outside academia. Together, they reveal that Baltimore has been ground zero for a slew of neoliberal policies and is a place where inequality has increased as corporate interests have eagerly privatized public goods and services to maximize profits. But they also uncover how community members resist and reveal a long tradition of Baltimoreans who have fought for social justice.
The essays in this collection take readers on a tour through the city’s diverse neighborhoods, from the Lumbee Indian community in East Baltimore to the crusade for environmental justice in South Baltimore. Baltimore Revisited examines the city’s past, reflects upon the city’s present, and envisions the city’s future.
Edited by P. Nicole King, Kate Drabinski, Joshua Clark Davis
Contributions by Lawrence Brown, Daniel L. Buccino, Michael Casiano, Sam Collins, Shannon Darrow, Matthew Durington, Nicole Fabricant, Aiden Faust, Jennifer A. Ferretti, Leif Fredrickson, Robert Gamble, Marisela Gomez, April K. Householder, Jodi Kelber- Kaye, Louise Parker Kelley, Emily Lieb, Jacob R. Levin, Teresa Méndez, Denise Meringolo, Ashley Minner, Elizabeth M. Nix, Richard E. Otten, Eli Pousson, Mary Rizzo, Fred Scharmen, Aletheia Hyun-Jin Shin, Linda Shopes, Michelle L. Stefano, Shawntay Stocks, Joe Tropea, and Amy Zanoni. Cover art by Markele Cullins.
Bmore Historic Happy Hour: How to Lead a Great Unconference Session is Wednesday, July 17, 2019 at 5pm at the Peabody Height Brewery. Please RSVP on the Eventbrite page or on Facebook.
Join us to learn how to translate your research interest or burning questions into a great session at the 2019 Bmore Historic Unconference on September 27. The discussion will be facilitated by local museum consultant Dean Krimmel, David Armenti, Director of Education at the Maryland Historical Society, and Kate Drabinski, a Gender & Women’s Studies faculty member at UMBC. All three are regular Bmore Historic participants with loads of experience organizing and facilitating sessions and workshops of all kinds.
Bmore Historic is a bit unusual. Instead of typical conference PowerPoint presentations, we ask our volunteer facilitators to design and lead interactive sessions full of discussion and participation. If you’ve never done that before, it might sound intimidating. Which is why you should consider attending this event where you’ll learn plenty of tips, tricks, and good ideas.
Following the discussion, stick around to talk, have a drink, and take in the brewery’s Baltimore sports history exhibits. You’ll be glad you did. Questions? Contact Dean Krimmel at deankrimmel@verizon.net.
The Orser Center is a co-sponsor of the 2019 Bmore Historic unconference at the Baltimore Museum of Industry on Friday, September 27. For more info visit: https://bmorehistoric.org/
We are excited to announce the NEW public humanities minor in the Department of American Studies‘ Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community, and Culture. Over the past three years a working group co-chaired by Nicole King (chair AMST) and Jessica Berman (Director, Dresher Center, ENGL) with representatives from over a dozen programs and departments across the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) at UMBC has been working to develop the minor. In fall 2019, we will offer the first iteration of PUBH 200: Introduction to Public Humanities (Tu/Th 1-2:15) at UMBC. More to come on the course soon… but you can read the basic details of the minor below.
Please send any questions to Nicole King at nking@umbc.edu.
The New Public Humanities Minor in the Department of American Studies’ Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community, and Culture (17 credits total)
Students use the tools and methods of the humanities to build knowledge democratically and respond critically to challenges of the twenty-first century. The courses in the public humanities minor prepare students to work collaboratively and creatively to connect original research and programming more deeply the public, including local communities. The minor builds skills for creating sustainable projects that actively engage the public in meaningful dialogue, interaction, and knowledge production. During their core coursework (PUBH 200, 301, and 401) students will develop a public-facing project and a portfolio of work while taking electives offered in AMST and participating departments.
CORE: (7 credits)
PUBH 200: Introduction to Public Humanities (NEW course – offered in fall semester)
AMST 300 OR HIST 300: Approaches/Methods courses in American Studies and Public History + PUBH 301: Project Development Lab1 credit lab (4 credits total)
ELECTIVES (6 credits):
2 courses from the same or related fields from approved programs and departments
