Countering Displacement through Collective Memory

Shareable is partnering with Tufts University on this ongoing lecture series hosted by professor Julian Agyeman (co-chair of Shareable’s governing board) and Cities@Tufts. The series explores equity and diversity in urban planning and design and is made possible with support from The Kresge Foundation, Barr Foundation, and Shift Foundation.

Shareable + Cities@Tufts

Cities@Tufts open lecture featuring Andrea Roberts

Cities@Tufts: Free Urban Planning Lecture Series

A collaboration between Tufts University and Shareable, Cities@Tufts is a free cross-disciplinary open education initiative connecting learners to urban thought leaders from all over the world.

Cities@Tufts is a cross-disciplinary academic initiative that recognizes Tufts as a leader in urban studies, planning, and sustainability. Join us as we welcome scholars and create spaces for innovative discussions on complex urban and environmental issues. Lecture summary:In the decades following the Civil War, recently emancipated people created freedom colonies through intentional and tactical design, ensuring refuge from political repression and violence. However, most freedom colonies were founded in ecologically vulnerable landscapes, making them disproportionately susceptible to flooding and other natural disasters in the present day. This talk tracks the history of displacement and dispossession that has led to the destruction, neglect, or dismantling of communities initially designed to protect African Americans from structural racism. Then the author explains how these communities’ unique challenges require new planning and design tools to detect the interplay of historical and contemporary conditions contributing to the cultural erasure of African American placemaking. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas, the platform the author has developed to map and aggregate sociocultural emplaced data about these disappearing landscapes and crowdsources and spatializes intangible heritage on a publicly available map. The Atlas provides a mechanism by which the public can search, add, and view database contents that make visible previously unmapped or undocumented settlements. The Atlas’ stories, images, and documents constitute a collective memory of Black placemaking that enables advocates to argue that these historically significant places are worthy of preservation. About the speaker: Dr. Andrea Roberts is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning and Co-Director of the School’s Center for Cultural Landscapes at the University of Virginia’s (UVA) School of Architecture. Before joining UVA, Dr. Roberts was an Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Texas A&M University (TAMU). She is a scholar-activist who brings 12 years of experience in community development, nonprofit administration, and advocacy to her engaged research and public scholarship. In 2014, she founded The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, the vehicle through which she mentors and trains future planners, preservationists, scholars, and community-based researchers to challenge freedom colony invisibility, environmental injustice, and land loss through heritage conservation. She and her team richly map these settlements via the interactive The Texas Freedom Colonies Project™, Atlas and Study, which spatializes sites’ histories through participatory action research methods, including oral histories.She has received awards for her engaged scholarship from The Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Urban Affairs Association. Roberts was a 2020-21 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow, an African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund grant recipient, and a 2020 Visiting Scholar at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, Abolition. Most recently, she served as Co-Project Director for the NEH Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty—"Towards a People's History of Landscape.”Dr. Roberts is also the Consultant/Owner of Freedom Colonies Project, LLC, which provides research and DEIA services to preservation organizations. She served as a Texas State Board of Review member and a National Monument Audit Advisory Board member. Dr. Roberts holds a Ph.D. in planning from The University of Texas at Austin (2016), an M.A. in government administration from the University of Pennsylvania (2006), and a B.A. in political science from Vassar College (1996). She is currently authoring a book, Never Sell the Land, about her experiences identifying Black planning and historic preservation practices that sustain cultural resilience within freedom colonies for The University of Texas Press."Following the lecture, there will be a Q&A moderated by Julian Agyeman.This event is part of the <a href="https://www.citiesattufts.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Cities@Tufts Virtual Colloquium</a>, an ongoing open lecture series from the Tufts School of Urban and Environmental Planning and <a href="https://www.shareable.net" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Shareable</a>.

Our {communityGuidelinesLink} describe the sort of content we prohibit on Eventbrite. If you suspect an event may be in violation, you can report it to us so we can investigate.

To report other categories of prohibited or illegal content, submit {link}

Countering Displacement through Collective Memory

More events from Shareable + Cities@Tufts

Discover more events from Shareable + Cities@Tufts, from Community to other experiences you might love.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.

Countering Displacement through Collective Memory

More events from Shareable + Cities@Tufts

Discover more events from Shareable + Cities@Tufts, from Community to other experiences you might love.

More Community events

Browse more Community events with different dates, prices, and formats to find your next great experience.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.