Re/Member Black Philadelphia is a multimodal digital scholarship and community archiving project, which investigates the increasingly endangered contexts of Black social and cultural life against the backdrop of this systematic displacement. “Black Philadelphia,” as conceived in this work, represents a racial-spatial-imaginative construct that indexes the memories, diverse histories, and lived experiences of the communities that comprise the city’s Black, or African diasporic population.
“Re/Member” serves as a methodological and analytical praxis, which speaks to the central role of collective memory and the value of the lived experiences of community members. Grounded within a resource-sharing and equitable access perspective, this project seeks to: (1) document processes of community change and displacement through multimodal storytelling, (2) support community institutions and members in digitally preserving significant historical materials, and (3) engage youth and other community members in place- based, collaborative inquiry. Utilizing interdisciplinary methods, including ethnographic and oral history techniques, geospatial mapping, filmmaking, and archiving, this work endeavors to make community perspectives and materials both visible and accessible by establishing a collaborative research practice and accompanying digital platform that fosters community narrative-making and preservation for historic posterity.
Check our more about our work here. Learn more about our work with the School District of Philadelphia here.