Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

Part of the Fall 2021 Colloquium (Place-Based Storytelling Techniques and Technologies)

Most of the projects we will hear about this semester take place on-site, utilizing features of the landscape. What are other digital spaces and archives that facilitate our ability to tell stories about a particular geography?

This week, we have two speakers in conversation about their work based in community archives. UC Santa Cruz Professor of Film and and Digital Media Rick Prelinger will join us to present on his Lost Landscapes project, which comes out of the Prelinger film archives. In the Lost Landscapes series, Prelinger has compiled and edited footage from home movies to provide portraits of cities through the lenses of everyday people. Over the last two decades, Prelinger has presented films about San Francisco, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, and, Oakland.

Artist and cultural organizer Savannah Wood will share her work helping to preserve the archives of the AFRO American Newspapers. Established in 1892, the AFRO is a weekly African-American newspaper published in Baltimore, Maryland and the longest-running African-American family-owned newspaper in the United States. Working closely with the collection, Savannah has created projects such as To The Front: Black Women and the Vote which utilized the archives to bring DC and Maryland’s Black women suffragists into the national suffrage conversation. Savannah will also share her work in progress on a current project related to the founding of the AFRO American Newspaper Archives and the role that land played.

The speakers will discuss questions around access to documentation, collaboration with communities, and the positionalities of the archivist and presenter. We will think critically about common forms of storytelling seen in commercial media, museums, and other cultural organizations.