Landscapes of Memory Cohort
We are seeking 20 students for a special Engagements opportunity. The Landscapes of Memory cohort invites students to creatively engage with the ways that personal and family narratives, media, theatre, migration, constructed spaces, and the legacy of enslavement impact our understanding of home, Charlottesville, and the American political landscape. Real and imagined environments become the arenas in which race is performed and our multi-faceted identities are explored. In our cohort, we will learn to engage with the diverse strengths, differences and personal histories of our fellow first-year Hoos. Through a series of multi-media texts, performances, and physical spaces, students will examine a cluster of approaches built upon deconstructing the center/periphery binary. Utilizing examples of community, institutional, and cultural memory, this cohort will create opportunities for students to understand how binary thought processes and systems work on the concept of identity and within our contemporary social and political environment at home, wherever that may be, and around the world.
The cohort will fulfill the four Engagements Pillars through a year-long sequence of courses. Each course offers fully paid visits to local sites and activities, including local theatre/dance productions, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, the Monacan Indian Nation, and multiple sites around UVA Grounds. A particularly special feature of this cohort is its partnership with community residents and activists, many of whom have contributed to the design and content of these four courses. Our community partners will share with the cohort some of their personal and powerful experiences.
Students should be prepared to attend at least one site visit or event per quarter.
To apply
Answer the following prompt in your pre-enrollment survey (150 - 200 words):
What is the role of personal and public history in your understanding of home and identity?
Courses
Ethical Engagements: Building UVA: Memory, History, and Descendant Communities
Lilian Feitosa
UVA is an internationally recognized historic place, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Looking back at its history, however, certain aspects are more visible and celebrated than others. In this course we discuss how we can examine UVA's history more ethically by reading scholarly efforts to investigate and recognize its history in collaboration with local members of the Descendants of the Enslaved Communities (DEC). We will learn about the architectural history of the Academical Village, the role of enslavement in building the university, and about recent efforts to document this role and bring its centrality into view. The course includes guest speakers, examination of rare historical documents in the Special Collections Library, field trips to local historical landmarks such as the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, and interaction with DEC members.
Engaging Differences: Origin Stories: Identity, Migration, and Homelands
Shilpa Dave
Why do we attach importance to origin stories? How does knowing our heritage or backstory (family history or national history) influence the way we imagine the past, the present, and the future? In this course we’ll read and discuss superhero narratives, immigration stories, and narratives of homelands and the American Dream. We’ll talk about why different perspectives are integral and valuable to the way we engage with others. We’ll consider how origin stories frame and influence discussions about power, privilege, place, and difference. How does our sense of self and our cultural values relate to constructions, and portrayals of national narratives such as the settlement of the New World and local histories of Charlottesville and the University of Virginia? We’ll examine how creation myths and origins appear in the superhero genre and other narratives and document how origin stories are a part of our own family histories and where/what we call home.
Engaging Aesthetics: Performing the Black Aesthetic
Eric Ramirez-Weaver/Leslie Scott-Jones
Western artistic pedagogy inherently hinders and alters how people of a global majority enter creative processes and spaces. This remains true even when modern theatrical productions or concert dance emphasize alterity, global styles or traditions. In this class, using the creative processes of theater and dance, you will experience different perspectives on and about stage based production. You will identify key aspects of the Black aesthetic, and gain the ability to unpack the tacit underlying assumptions which inform global creative practices, commonly referred to as ideological frameworks. Utilizing history, scripts, staged works, and classic performances, students will evaluate dance, theatrical and literary form and structure in order to unpack the lived experiences of the global majority, explore alternatives, and critically interrogate how and why form, function, rhythm, and performance create and support identity. Weekly we will approach our course through a series of juxtapositions between theatrical and dance creations which allow us to explore common themes and pose complementary questions.
Empirical and Scientific Engagement: The Numbers Are Not What They Seem!
Dan Spitzner
This course guides students to engage with empiricism from a place of creativity, curiosity, and ethical priority. It exposes students to multiple dimensions of empiricism, covering both the benefits and harms of its associated perspectives and accompanying methodologies. In doing so, it brings to the fore a contextualized and worldly understanding of empiricism. The course looks critically at modes of inquiry that are anchored in the triad of scientific experimentation, numerical measurement, and statistical analysis, subsequently opening a path to exploring the intersections of statistical practice with ways of knowing that emphasize the social context of inquiry, and that define objectives from ethical rather than scientific criteria. Students are exposed to methods of empirical inquiry beyond the quantitative, including qualitative methodologies, transformative and emancipatory practices, arts-based inquiry, community-based practices, and to accompanying challenges that arise in multimethodological research teams. Numbers are not as simple as empiricism promises them to be. This course aims to bring out their inherent multidimensionality and complexity.