Project

Speaking into Silences: Building Community Archives across the Puerto Rican Archipelago

Program

ACLS Digital Justice Development Grants

Department

Graduate Research and Innovation Center and Oral History Lab

Abstract

Leveraging the resources of the Oral History Lab @UPRM—and the experience of its interdisciplinary leadership team—the proposed project facilitates the development of community-led oral history for social justice projects from inception to dissemination: tailoring technology kits, digital archives, and multimodal outputs to the specific needs and assets of four community partner sites across the Puerto Rican archipelago. Moving centers of knowledge production from the academy to the community, this project develops post-custodial community archives that remain onsite for direct access by community members, while making stories of surviving stratified disasters (and the experiential knowledges they hold) widely available through mirror collections housed at the Lab.