Our speaker series brings preeminent practitioners of engaged community scholarship to American University each semester.  The series offer us a platform to reflect upon and further develop our understanding of effective practices in community-based scholarship.

Elena Gonzales - "Exhibitions for Social Justice: Engaging Communities Within the Gallery"

There are 80,000 museums in the world. Elena Gonzales’s new book, Exhibitions for Social Justice, addresses the ways in which curators can use the space inside exhibitions to make our societies more pro-social and support our ongoing human project on the planet. Gonzales hopes the ideas in the book – and this talk – will inspire people inside and outside of the cultural sector in their practices as curators, activists, students, and teachers. 

Cancelled due to COVID-19.

Drawing on his own recent work on the digital frontier, Professor Frisch will discuss two contrasting directions towards a new oral and public history—approaches that can close the extensive distance between archived collections and meaningful public and community use.

Click here to watch videos from the event.

Our first speaker in this series was Jeremy Brecher, a lifelong practitioner of community-based history, who reflected on the history of “history from below” and how popular participation in interpreting the past might contribute to shaping the future.

Click here to watch videos from the event.

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