Principal Investigator: Jillian Lerner, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Art History, Visual Art and Theory
Project description
Generating pedagogical engagements with historical photographs, this project aims to foster cultural humility and relational accountability. It investigates place-based and community-engaged approaches to teaching and learning, in activities that center social justice storytelling and reparative histories of photography. Each photograph is a site of negotiation where social relations are perpetuated or contested. Working to reframe artifacts in local collections, students will reflect upon relations of voicing, silencing, and power that shape photographic histories and local histories. I seek to nourish and measure students’ capacities for self-reflexivity and social responsibility as they contribute to storywork in meaningful engagements with community partners..
Research questions
- How does the community-engaged learning (CEL) experience alter students’:
- critical and affective engagement with the course material?
- capacity for relational accountability (i.e. responsibility to all relations, cultural humility, disposition toward social justice)?
- understanding of how power and positionality inform our ways of knowing?