Imagining America: Art, Culture & Community Development Collaboratory
As a Ph.D student I often struggled to balance my concern for the local arts community in Providence, where I have now lived for eleven years, with my interests in larger historical issues around cultural development and post-industrial urban history. In 2011 I joined a team of scholars and administrators affiliated with the Imagining America consortium to conduct on-the-ground historical research, based in targeted interviews and the organizational archives of university and college engagement centers and community-based cultural organizations. The research collaborative set out with the goal of better understanding how non-local University partners have affected and been affected by their partnerships in the cultural sector of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Working as participant-observers with New Orleans cultural organizations like Ashé Cultural Center, HOME New Orleans, Vietnamese Initiatives in Economic Training and Xavier University’s Community Arts program, and in archives of bureaucratic correspondences and promotional materials from The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Macalester College enabled my co-investigators and I to report on the promising practices and short-comings of non-local scholarly engagement in the cultural sector of New Orleans. The findings from our study also helped me to frame the scope of an ongoing research project that I have been involved in back at home.
Imagining America Art, Culture and Community Development Pilot Case Study of engaged scholarship and service learning in post-Katrina New Orleans with Dr. Catherine Michna, Ruth Janisch-Lake, Dr. Cheryl Ajirotutu, and Ron Bechet.