ANDREA ROBERTS

Scholar-Activist

Dr. Andrea Roberts is a scholar-activist who brings 12 years of experience in community development, nonprofit administration, and advocacy to her engaged research and public scholarship, which raises awareness of the entrenched racial biases impeding documentation, recognition, and preservation of historic Black settlements’ cultural assets. She created what she calls a Place Preservation research model (collect data, connect descendants, and co-create solutions), which focuses on descendant community involvement and project-based learning for students.

Cultural Landscapes

Dr. Andrea Roberts is the Project Co-Director with Dr. Thaisa Way for the NEH Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty—”Towards a People’s History of Landscape, Part 1: Black & Indigenous Histories of the Nation’s Capital. During the three-week institute, participants will collaborate to develop online, open-source curriculum modules that teach landscape-oriented social histories, centering Black and Indigenous historical narratives in the founding of the United States and the District of Columbia.

Engaged Public Scholarship

As Director of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project™, Dr. Andrea Roberts trains student researchers, volunteers, and the freedom colony diaspora to contribute place histories and memories to The TXFCP Study and Atlas, a publicly accessible map and settlement database. The goal of The TXFCP is to prevent the erasure, destruction, and decay of cultural properties within settlements in partnership with descendant communities.

Critical Pedagogy

Dr. Andrea Roberts's teaching philosophy is grounded in a desire to train future leaders to move marginalized communities’ histories, planning methods, and agendas from the periphery to the center of practice and policymaking. Her approach is situated in a space of radical possibility between didactic teaching of core competencies and critical pedagogy.