Trinity’s Public Humanities Collaborative Announces Hybrid Program for Summer 2021
In its fourth year, the Public Humanities Collaborative (PHC) will look a little different this year. Through the last three years, we have seen how the PHC gives students the opportunity to engage with multiple methods and contexts for creating new knowledge in the humanities by participating in small teams that work on faculty scholarship, on partners’ public humanities projects, and meet regularly to learn about community collaboration and digital tools. We wanted to ensure that these opportunities would continue this year, despite challenges presented by the Covid pandemic. From over 62 applicants, PHC selected 16 students to work in a flexible, hybrid program on 11 faculty research projects and 9 public humanities projects with community organizations. Each student is set to receive a $4000 stipend and work on-campus for the first five weeks and remotely for the second five weeks.
For the length of the program, students split their full-time work between faculty projects and community partner projects, learning about multiple facets of academic and public humanities-based work. Students engaged in practices including: archival research, oral history interviewing and indexing, digital storytelling, web content creation, and planning for public programs and performances. This year, with support from Trinity’s Digital Scholarship and Educational Technology staff, we will also implement a full day orientation as well as a weekly blog reflection assignment as a component of students’ individual digital portfolios. This reflection and portfolio component will allow students to make meaning of and showcase their work at the end of the summer. All students, faculty, community partners and PHC affiliates will also be invited to attend weekly lunch and learn workshops covering a variety of topics including workflow and project management strategies, digital tools in the public humanities, and career and education panels with local experts from Trinity and the Hartford area. Thanks to the generosity of our community partners, we also plan to organize a few field trips to visit our partner organizations and the sites where they do their work.
Faculty Research Projects will include:
- Aidalí Aponte-Avilés and Christina Bleyer, “Voces de la Migración: Archiving and Sharing the U.S. Latinx Experience in Hartford”
- Susan Masino, “Nature and Brain Health – Science, Art, and CHOICES”
- Glenn Falk, “Crime and Punishment in Early America”
- Amanda Guzman, “Hashtag Memories: Puerto Rican Community Archiving as Collaborative Place-making Practice”
- Seth Markle, “Hip Hop Histories: The Trinity International Hip Hop Festival Digital Archive”
- Alden Gordon, “400 Years of Public Art in the Connecticut River Valley”
- Diana Paulin, “Locating Autistic Blackness/Black Autism in the Archives”
- Mary Dudas, “Incredible Speech and the Deferral of Violence”
- Mary Mahoney and Cait Kennedy, “A Portal for Open Pedagogy: Connecting Students with Open Collections Using Digital Instruction”
- Dan Mrozowski, “Sci-Fi in the Archives: Cataloguing the Loftus E. Becker Collection at the Watkinson Library”
- Erica Crowley and Joe Barber, “Archiving the History of Trinity’s Hartford Engagement”
Community Partner Projects will include:
- Hartford History Center, “Voices of Migration / Voces de la Migracion: Archiving and Sharing the U.S. Latinx Experience in Hartford”
- Park Watershed, “A New Future for Nature in Cities”
- Old New-Gate Prison, “Humanizing History at Old-New Gate Prison & Copper Mine”
- Hartford Public Library, Park Street @ the Lyric, “Hashtag Memories: Puerto Rican Community Archiving as Collaborative Place-making Practice”
- Khaiim Kelly Rapoetry Workshop, “Hip Hop Histories: Living Hip Hop”
- Hartbeat Ensemble, “En/Insuring Black Lives: From Slavery to Black Lives Matter”
- Connecticut State Library CT Digital Newspaper Project, “Exploring Underrepresented Topics in Connecticut and National History”
- Connecticut State Library and Concerned Parents of Color West Hartford, “No Longer Bound: Tracing the Journey to Freedom in Connecticut”
- Kamora’s Cultural Corner, “Cultural Humility: Conversations on Identity, Race, Politics, and Spirituality”
The 2021 Public Humanities Collaborative is funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Office of Community Learning, and the Dean of the Faculty’s Office. For more information on the Public Humanities Collaborative, including how you can propose a project in the future, contact [email protected] and [email protected]
