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Race/Ethnicity

1/19/17

By Dan Rodricks | Roughly Speaking Podcast

In this podcast, culture commentator Sheri Parks talks about the transition from Obama to Trump, and Friday’s inauguration.

Listen to the complete podcast online at Roughly Speaking.

1/11/17 - 2:00 PM

The College of Arts and Humanities and Maryland Humanities presented Pulitzer Prize-winning author-historians Taylor Branch and Isabel Wilkerson in conversation with Sherrilyn Ifill.

Baltimore Stories Events Highlight Video

Highlights from the Baltimore Stories project. The initiative was a year long project of 20 events used to promote empathy through the sharing of stories and narratives. 
The Bal...

POET & MACARTHUR GENIUS CLAUDIA RANKINE VISITS UMD FOR 2016-17 WORLDWISE ARTS AND HUMANITIES DEAN'S LECTURE SERIES

Claudia Rankine read from her acclaimed book "Citizen" and spoke about the relationships between race, art and citizenship.

The Center for Synergy in the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU) has received a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund “Home Stories,” a digital storytelling project that empowers migrant youth to create and share their stories with the wider public.

The award is part of NEH’s inaugural Humanities Access grants, which provide cultural programming to underserved groups and were awarded to 34 organizations. The grant is designed to encourage fundraising and sustainability of ongoing programming.

The project co-directors are Ana Patricia Rodríguez, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and Sheri Parks, associate dean of research, interdisciplinary scholarship and programming and associate professor of American studies.

The project responds to the growing number of often-unaccompanied migrant youth who travel to the U.S.-Mexico border and eventually seek to reunite with families, relatives or friends who live in the long-standing Central American communities near the University of Maryland. These newcomers navigate multiple identities but rarely have the opportunity to reflect on or share these experiences. Despite the scale of youth migration to this area, there is little research or ethnographic work generated about or by these youth.

“We are living in a historical moment where there is an explosion in migration,” says Rodríguez.  “Digital storytelling is a way of uncovering these stories and making them accessible to a wider public, and it is something that anyone can learn.”

“Home Stories” extends the Center for Synergy’s ongoing Social Innovation Scholars Program into the public humanities. Through the project, undergraduate students at the University of Maryland will enroll in a multi-semester course with Rodríguez to learn about the migrant experience while collaborating with migrant youth from local middle and high schools to explore digital storytelling.  Digital stories are multimedia movies that combine voiceovers, video, sound and text to create a narrative. Both in and out of the classroom, they are a tool for not only developing technical skills, but also promoting self-reflection and critical thinking.

“The project is a way of connecting students who have the technological skills with migrant youth in communities who have important stories to tell,” says Rodríguez.  “Digital storytelling is a democratizing tool that allows these stories to be created and shared across communities.”

The project will work with youth in local schools that enroll large numbers of recently arrived migrant youth from Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean and culminates in a community screening of the filmed stories these youth produce, which will then be available on a public website.

“The humanities help us study our past, understand our present, and prepare for our future,” says NEH Chairman William D. Adams. “The National Endowment for the Humanities is proud to support projects that will benefit all Americans and remind us of our shared human experience.”

 

Image Credit:
Close up of Child Migrant Quilt Project (September 2014)
© Ana Rosa Ventura-Molina 2014

12/6/16

By Jessica Anderson | The Baltimore Sun

"One photograph shows a National Guardsman in fatigues outside Harborplace. Another captures a large crowd gathered outside Penn Station. A third shows young boys riding bicycles past marchers carrying signs that read "Justice 4 Freddie Carlos Gray."

"The more than 12,000 images — some taken by seasoned photographers, others by ordinary people with cellphones —form one part of "Baltimore Stories: Narratives and the Life of an American City."

"The yearlong project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, aimed to "contextualize narratives of race," organizers said. The Dresher Center for the Humanities in the University of Maryland, Baltimore County's College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences hosted the event, and the project was a collaboration among the University of Maryland's College of Arts and Humanities, Maryland Humanities, and others."

Read the complete article at The Baltimore Sun.

11/11/16

Tom Hall | "Midday" WYPR

"On November 8th, voters chose Donald Trump to be the next President. As Americans come to terms with the idea of a Trump presidency, many questions still remain. What does the election of Donald Trump tell us about our country’s apparent embrace of unprecedented change, and what does it tell us about what Americans are repudiating? Is this a repudiation of civility in politics?  Is it an embrace of isolationism, and a repudiation of tolerance? Is it, as Mr. Trump suggested early this morning, a cry from those who have been forgotten, or is it a mean-spirited and fear-fueled affirmation of a system that favors white people over people of color? "

Listen to the complete postcast on WYPR

Image: Hillary Clinton supporters emotional at campaign headquarters. Via WYPR.

 

McKeldin 6137 Special Events Room
Friday, October 28, 2016 - 9:00 AM to 1:30 PM

Join us for a campus-wide initiative to learn more about scholarship at UMD focused on the African-American Experience.

9/13/16

The Baltimore City Paper named "BMORE Than the Story "Best Community Curation" in its 2016 "Best of Baltimore" issue. Curated by students from associate Professor of design Audra Buck-Coleman’s course on design in society and students from the Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts, the “BMORE Than The Story” exhibition at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum addressed the one-sided media portrayal and the realities of the west Baltimore students’ lives. 

The Baltimore City Paper writes:

"Baltimore’s museums generally feature exhibitions organized by professional curators, but in the aftermath of the uprising following the murder of Freddie Gray, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum opened up its exhibit space to students from Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts. The students curated a response to the ugly media narrative about their lives that the press put out in April 2015. Working with UMD students, the result was “BMORE Than the Story,” which highlighted stories from students about their experiences with surveillance, police brutality, and civic deprivation. The show was a powerful challenge to the carceral logics of their schools and neighborhoods that resonated far beyond the museum walls."

Read the complete article at the Baltimore City Paper website.

Image via the Baltimore City Paper

MITH Conference Room
Tuesday, October 25, 2016 - 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM

Ravon Ruffin is co-creator of Brown Girls Museum Blog, a site to promote the visibility of minority communities as museum professionals, audiences, and creatives.

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