Projects
NEH Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty (2022)
Toward a People’s History of Landscape: Black and Indigenous Histories of the Nation’s Capital
“Towards a People’s History of Landscape – Part 1: Black & Indigenous Histories of the Nation’s Capital,” a level 1 institute that is being offered for the first time, will convene at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. The Institute will bring humanist scholars from across the university together to explore alternative approaches to scholarship and teaching landscape-oriented social histories, centering Black and Indigenous historical narratives in the founding of the United States and the District of Columbia. This institute’s focus is identifying promising approaches to teaching “difficult” or challenging landscape histories. The results of the Summer Institute will become part of an online repository of teaching modules available to faculty around the United States.
Project Director(s)
Andrea Roberts; Thaïsa Way
Lecturers and Visiting Faculty
Chadwick Allen; Brandi Thompson Summers; Amber Wiley
Link to Institute Website: https://sites.google.com/apeopleslandscapehistory.org/home/application
The Course (2018-19)
Critical Place Studies: Theory, Research, & Practice
Course Description
How do we convince planners and policymakers that “hidden publics and places” matter? This course explores creative approaches to increasing hidden publics’ and places’ visibility, defining fuzzy place boundaries, and explaining their significance even when their physical integrity has declined. The course introduces students to historic preservation laws, research approaches, and documentation methodologies, which can make endangered places and landscapes more visible and valued. Endangered places and landscapes of concern include neighborhoods, cemeteries, indigenous land, and historic black settlements (freedom colonies) or any places in the crosshairs of infrastructure projects, disasters, dispossession, and displacement.
Throughout the course, students will contemplate, through a critical lens, racialized and gendered places, and historic, vernacular, and ethnographic landscapes as locations, places, legal jurisdictions, constructs, theoretical frameworks, and regulatory context. Students will embrace nontraditional approaches to cultural landscape/place identification, documentation, and storytelling to make visible “hard to see” landscapes or legally undefined places. Our methodological toolkit includess historical inquiry, archival and ethnographic research, citizen science/crowdsourcing, and digital humanities (DH). These approaches will help students develop outreach and training materials for grassroots groups, update a mapping tool, design a crowdsourcing function, and present a research proposal for new freedom colony districts and policy reforms.
The following questions shape our interrogation of place and landscape
- What is a cultural landscape perspective and how does that shape planning practice?
- How do we define, preserve, and plan for unmapped places without clear borders?
- How should planners approach research and engagement within cultural landscapes?
- How do we preserve and document multilayered and ever-changing places?
- How do we leverage the digital humanities to increase place visibility and engage stakeholders in planning processes?
- What are acceptable forms of place “evidence”?
- What are the socioeconomic, political and ethical implications of various research approaches within endangered places?
How do we reform current regulatory and sociopolitical environments affecting these places?
Course Goals & Learning Objectives
By the end of the course, students will demonstrate an ability to synthesize critical analysis, creative research approaches, regulatory concerns, and an equity lens in their group and individual work products.
The course will increase student knowledge in three areas:
- Historic preservation regulations
- Creative research/documentation methodologies
- Critical race and cultural landscape theories.