WHEN: October 1, 2015, 6 - 8 PM
WHERE: Knox Hall, 606 W. 122nd Street, Room 509
In San Francisco, cranes litter the horizon, neighborhoods have quickly become more expensive, longtime residents are rapidly displaced and the city has gained international attention for skyrocketing rents, and exponentially growing income inequality. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s “Narratives of Displacement: Oral History Project” aims to document these changes in San Francisco by foregrounding the stories of people who have been, who are being, or who were being, displaced. Through collecting oral histories the project creates a living archive of people and places, documenting deep and detailed neighborhood and personal histories. In doing so the project creates a counter-narrative to more dominant archives that elide detail and attention to legacy, culture, and loss in the city. Our map lives online to be interacted with by the public, but also offline in physical spaces including our current zine project and our narrative mural in Clarion Alley. While we are interested in stories of dispossession, we are not interested in reducing people to their evictions, and thus instead focus on the intimacies of personal relationships to shifts in spatiality as processes of gentrification unevenly unfold. We recognize that displacement transpires in kaleidoscopic forms, and that loss is corporeal, cultural, haunting, and real. In this talk Manissa Maharawal the co-director of the Narratives of Displacement Project will discuss how the project was formulated, evolved and changed and the ways in which the project engages practices of radical mapping to engage the public.
Manissa Maharawal is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at The CUNY Graduate Center, an activist, oral historian and poet. Her dissertation research focuses on struggles over urban space, gentrification and contemporary youth social movements in the United States. She is broadly interested in historical and contemporary struggles for social justice and understanding dynamics of race, class, and gender in the formation of political subjectivities. A trained oral historian she is the co-director and co-founder of the Narratives of Displacement Project in San Francisco and is currently an ACLS/Mellon Fellow. She is from and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
SPONSORS: This talk is part of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) and the Oral History Master of Arts Program (OHMA). Support from the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) is provided for programming that embodies late Professor Paul Lazarsfeld’s commitment to improving methodological approaches that address concerns of vital cultural and social significance.
INFORMATION: For more information, please email Amy Starecheski at aas39(at)columbia.edu
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
NO REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED