ARCHIVE from 2021 inaugural BFS 1.0:
Archive from 2021…The summer 2021 Baltimore Field School strives to create frameworks for faculty and graduate students to build public humanities projects and collaborate with community organizations in developing methods for ethical research and teaching projects focused in Baltimore. The project is supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The guiding vision: Ethical principles for humanities research in Baltimore will emerge through collaborative work in the field with our local partners and honest discussions about humanities methods.
The pilot Baltimore Field School will run in Summer 2021… June 21 – 25 (primarily virtual, due to the global pandemic).
A PROJECT IS REALLY ITS PEOPLE…
Same tab:
Baltimore Field School, 2021 Fellows
Keisha McIntosh Allen (she/her/hers) is an assistant professor in the Department of Education at UMBC. Allen’s research acknowledges the full humanity of Black teachers and students by examining how schools can be spaces that affirm their humanity. Her current research examines culturally informed initiatives and practices that help to recruit, induct, and retain Black pre-service and in-service teachers in the profession. Her work also examines humanizing pedagogies during distance learning.
Melisa Argañaraz Gomez is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems at UMBC. Her current areas of research include urban and feminist geographies, migration studies as well as race and ethnicity. Her current work examines migrant children and youth narratives of inclusion and (un)belonging in Baltimore. Her last two projects are “All about Baltimore Map” in collaboration with Latinx summer scholars in Centro Sol and “Parqueologia Migrante” in collaboration with Latinas al Rescate and CASA de Maryland.
Dena Aufseeser is an assistant professor of Geography. Her research and teaching are united by a desire to better understand and expose processes and effects of inequality. Her work critically questions dominant understandings of childhood, mobility, and spaces of learning and labor. Previous projects focus on youth organizing, critical spaces of education, and uneven urban development and dispossession. Current projects include historical research on narratives of decline in Baltimore and the relationship between social welfare policy, children’s work, and ideas of deservingness, as well as work with Venezuelan migrants in Peru.
Melissa Blair (she/her/hers) is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at UMBC. She is a historian of architecture, landscapes and material culture with 20 years of experience gained at public history and academic institutions. She teaches the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and historic preservation. She is co-author of Washington and Baltimore Art Deco: A Design History of Neighboring Cities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Her current research focuses on the Mid-Atlantic’s rural buildings and landscapes, the farming patterns that shaped them, and their preservation.
UMBC’s History of Baltimore course explores how ordinary people made and remade Baltimore’s landscapes over time. Blair will develop a plan for how to significantly elevate the community-based aspects of the course and to ensure students discovery and learning can have a more profound impact on Baltimore communities.
Mike Casiano (he/him/his) is an assistant professor of American Studies at UMBC. His book project, Broken City: Race, Policing, and Urban Development in Baltimore, 1857-1930, examines how urbanization developed in lockstep with—and shaped—municipal policing. He is the board president of Charm City Land Trusts, Inc. (CCLT), a community land trust that stewards greenspace and develops permanently-affordable housing in East Baltimore, where he also lives.
Mike Casiano will use BFS’ collaborative space as an opportunity to design a community engagement course that explores speculative housing practices, gentrification, and the radical potential of community land trusts, housing cooperatives, and other alternative land uses to bring students and stakeholders together to learn from one another.
Forrest Caskey (he/his/him) is an assistant professor of Developmental Literacy at Anne Arundel Community College and a doctoral student in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program at UMBC. His interests are in sociolinguistics, decolonizing and antiracist pedagogy, and the uses of language to create identity. He has been teaching in higher education for 15 years and before that was a bartender, sous chef, journalist, seabird biologist, and grocery store cashier.
With the closure of numerous long-standing LGBT+ venues in Baltimore, queer communities are reconceptualizing queer space. Specifically, the loss of Club Bunns, serving a predominantly Black sexual and gender minority clientele, illustrates the geo-social shift for queer communities. Caskey would like to capture the past, present, and future of these places and preserve the voices of those who kept them alive.
María Célleri (she/hers/ella) is an assistant professor in Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at UMBC. Her book project, Uncovering the Virgen del Panecillo: Quito’s (Neo)Colonial Urban Transformation is a cultural research study of the importance of the monument of the Virgen del Panecillo. Evan Apodaca is a media artist based in San Diego, CA. He is the director of Que Lejos Estoy: Picturing Assimilation and is currently working on a hybrid-documentary series, Secret City.
María Célleri and Evan Apodaca are working on a mixed-media film series about monuments as spaces of/for storytelling. The project is a website that showcases short-film vignettes. These use performative interplay and facial-motion capture to interject dialogue into monuments in Baltimore and San Diego to engage a bi-coastal conversation drawing connections between sites of imperialist commemoration and racialized violence.
Keegan Cook Finberg (she/ her/ hers) is an assistant professor of English, and affiliate faculty in the departments of Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies and Language, Literacy & Culture at UMBC. She is currently working on a book about the politics of post-1960s poetry in the United States. She writes both academic essays and public scholarship about poetry, urban space, and feminist and queer practice. She is also a poet and the author of The Thought of Preservation.
Keegan Cook Finberg will be developing partnerships for her new course, “Baltimore Poetry and Politics,” which is supported by the Dresher Center Inclusion Imperative. The course investigates the links between social justice and poetry by exploring the history of Baltimore’s Black Arts Movement, the 2015 uprising, and recent mobilization around red-lining, inequity, and underinvestment in the city.
Shenita Denson (she/her/hers) was born and raised in the American South, by amazing military parents, where she developed a love for culture, the arts, storytelling + food for the soul. She is a full-time language, literacy and culture doctoral student, social scientist, lecturer, and a creative. Her research explores the impact that stories (heard and told) have on our identity, relationships, and health and/or well-being. She is the 2021-2022 Secretary of the Interpersonal Communication Division of the National Communication Association.
Shenita Denson will be extending her interpersonal communication research on retrospective storytelling and communicated narrative sense-making in the Black community around intimate topics. Denson will explore translational, collaborative community-based methods that collect and listen to stories, while centering the lived experiences and voices of those willing to share them. Longer term, Denson hopes to implement her findings to teach others how to collect and listen to intimate stories of marginalized groups in ethical, compassionate, and theory-proven ways.
Sarah Fouts (she/her and they/them) is an assistant professor in the Department of American Studies and core faculty in the Public Humanities minor. She received her PhD in Latin American Studies at Tulane University and an MS in Urban Studies at the University of New Orleans. Fouts’s research interests include transnationalism, Honduras, New Orleans, ethnography, political economy, public humanities, and food studies.
Sarah Fouts will develop a collaborative New Orleans-based street food vendor public humanities project, expand this project to Baltimore, and redesign my American Food course to incorporate this work. The street vendor project will connect past with present and include mapping, digital humanities, storytelling, and public programming components
Charlotte Keniston came to Baltimore in 2011 to pursue an MFA in Intermedia and Digital Arts at UMBC. As an Open Society Institute Fellow she ran community food programs in Southwest Baltimore. Charlotte has taught classes at UMBC in Food Systems, Photography, and Public Art, and is currently a doctoral student in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program, studying participatory visual research methods and social change. She is Associate Director of the Shriver Peaceworker Fellows program and is active in both the UMBC and International Digital Storytelling communities.
Tania Lizarazo is an assistant professor at UMBC in the Global Studies Program, and the Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication. She is an affiliate faculty in Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies, and the Language, Literacy & Culture Program. Her research interests include digital storytelling, Latin American cultural studies, transnational feminisms and performance studies. Her recent digital storytelling projects are a collaboration with the Gender Commission of a Black farmers’ organization from the Colombian Pacific, a collaboration with LGBTQ members of farm working communities in California’s Central Valley, and ongoing collaborations with Baltimore’s Immigrant Communities.
Moving Stories: Latinas en Baltimore is a digital storytelling project created in 2016. Rooted in slow scholarship and trust-building for the co-creation of stories about movement (migration, identity, embodied knowledge, etc.), this project has only two stories to date. Participating in BFS will facilitate opportunities for collaboration and storytelling.
Aimée Pohl is a Public History MA student in the History Department at UMBC. Her academic interests include urban studies, oral history, the history of social movements, and political philosophy. She is currently studying community response and resistance to the lead poisoning epidemic in Baltimore during the conservative ascendency of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Aimée Pohl is creating a public history project on resistance to the lead paint poisoning epidemic in Baltimore, based on interviews with activists who fought for policy change and accountability from landlords and the City and State. It will be developed with community narrators as co-creators, who will share authority over, and ownership of the work.Pohl
Cristina Reguera Gomez (She/her/hers) born in Barcelona, Spain. She has a BA in English Studies from the University of Salamanca, where she also worked as English instructor. As a third-year student, she got the opportunity to study at University College London with an Erasmus scholarship. She is currently studying for a MA in Intercultural Communication at UMBC thanks to a Fulbright scholarship. She speaks five languages: Spanish, English, French, Mandarin Chinese, and Galician.
Through this program, Cristina Ruguera Gomez will explore how Latinx communities in Baltimore navigate their dual cultural identity: the Latinx and the US American one. More specifically, Gomez will focus on the acculturation process and identity salience according to the environment.
UMBC Team
Kimberly Moffitt, Interim Dean, College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
Nicole King, Associate Professor & Chair, American Studies + Director, Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community, and Culture
Imani Spence, Program Manager
Community Partners
Eric Jackson is the founder and Servant-Director of 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.
Curtis Eaddy II work on projects at the Southwest Partnership and has developed the Beautiful Side of Ugly arts project. The Southwest Partnership is a coalition of seven neighborhood associations and six anchor institutions in Southwest Baltimore.
Project Evaluator/Assessor
Dr. Tahira Mahdi is 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.
Project Consultants
Lawrence T. Brown is author of The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America (2021) and the founder and director of the Black Butterfly Project, a racial equity education and consulting firm in Baltimore City.
Nicole Fabricant, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Towson University
Samir Meghelli is a historian, writer, educator, and serves as Senior Curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, DC where he curated the A Right to the City exhibition and Food for the People: Eating and Activism in Greater Washington.
Mary Rizzo is Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Public and Digital Humanities Initiatives at Rutgers University, Newark and author of Come and Be Shocked: Representing Baltimore from John Waters to The Wire.
Working Group (from Orser Center advisory committee)
Earl Brooks, Assistant Professor, English, UMBC
Rachel Brubaker, Dresher Center, UMBC
Mike Casiano, Assistant Professor, American Studies, UMBC
Safiyah Cheatam, MFA student, Intermedia + Digital Art, UMBC
Shenita Denson, PhD student, Language, Literacy, and Culture
Kate Drabinski, Senior Lecturer, Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, UMBC
Nicole Fabricant, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Towson University
Sarah Fouts, Assistant Professor, American Studies, UMBC
Dillon Mahmoudi, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Systems, UMBC
Denise Meringolo, Associate Professor, Director of Public History, UMBC
Ashley Minner, Professor of the Practice, American Studies, UMBC
Bill Shewbridge, Professor of the Practice, Media & Communications Studies, New Media Studio, UMBC
Michelle Stefano, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress