CURRENTS: Notes from the Baltimore Field School
Wednesday, November 10, 2021 · 12 - 1 PM
Join us for a special edition of the lunchtime series, CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now, as we feature works in progress from fellows from the 2021 Baltimore Field School.
Retrospective Storytelling: Intergenerational Exchanges About Love
Shenita Denson, Ph.D. Student, Language, Literacy, and Culture Program, 2021 Baltimore Field School Fellow
Shenita Denson’s research is centered on the stories we hear and tell – and those we wish we heard or told – around intimate topics and how they impact our identities, relationships, and our health/well-being. For her dissertation, Denson is focusing on the intergenerational stories, heard and told, among Millennials and Baby Boomers in the Black community around love, in particular self-love, familial love, romantic love, agape love. Utilizing concepts of time, space, place and generativity (the passing down of wisdom), her research challenges us to examine how the communities in which we belong, can be impacted either through the use of telling stories.
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Interrogating (Anti-) Extractive Storytelling Methods in Food Ethnography
Sarah Fouts, Assistant Professor, American Studies; and Director, Public Humanities Minor
Set within expanding tourism industries and post-disaster contexts, Sarah Fouts’ book project uses multiple frameworks of food—from taco trucks to single agricultural commodities—to bring to the surface the interrelated issues of power, exploitation, struggle, and multiracial solidarities that emerge from the transnational stories of Honduran immigrants in post-Katrina New Orleans. Each core chapter is framed around a type of “extractivism” – land, labor, culture, and stories – and offers examples of resistance and “anti-extractive” approaches. Like a greedy developer extracts land and labor from poor and working class people, a researcher, too, can be culpable when using stories without collaboration, consent, and/or recompense. Applying extractivism as a conceptual framework to narrative and community-based work heeds a growing ethical call from scholars and journalists in regards to interviews and public engagement. For this presentation, Fouts will critically examine research case studies and draw from anti-extractivism scholarship that aims to build more collaborative methodological research approaches by “researching up.”
The Baltimore Field School is supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Meeting ID: meet.google.com/jdi-brdr-wca
Phone Numbers: (US) +1 470-705-4752
PIN: 428 089 107#
PIN: 428 089 107#
Image description: Side by side photos - On the left, a woman wearing a yellow dress and a straw hat poses outside and is smiling. On the right, a person with short, dark hair, leans against a wall outside and is smiling.