Wenner-Gren DFG, Nov 1 2026: final paste pack (pages 9–11)

Resubmission statement (end of page 8, just above Longform) (961 words / limit 1000)

This application resubmits a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant proposal that did not advance in a prior cycle. The revision does not polish the same packet. It changes the research design so that the project meets what the DFG funds: one answerable anthropological question, countable new evidence collected during a defined fieldwork window, and a Plan B that reaches the same empirical question by alternate routes rather than by shifting into public-media production.

Three limitations in the earlier submission are the focus of this rewrite.

First, the prior main questions were methodological and aspirational—asking how new technologies or research-creation might explore fugitive histories—rather than posing a single empirical problem that field and archival evidence could answer. Multiple sub-questions (spatial, sonic, ethical, interactive) competed for attention, which diluted the comparative stakes. Second, digital platforms and multimodal outputs occupied the center of gravity in the purpose and methods sections. That framing pulled the proposal toward dissertation-completion and public-media deliverables rather than toward collection of evidence in archives and communities during the grant period. Third, the fieldwork plan was short, geographically diffuse, and under-specified: a compressed summer “field” phase, a brief Canada visit, and a long list of possible northern and Canadian sites without a comparative design, residency schedule, or countable interview and archive-day targets. Plan B in that version leaned on remote media production rather than on an alternate path to the same evidence base.

The revised project answers those problems with a locked comparative spine and a corridor of route evidence.

Comparative question. The research asks how descendant and steward communities linked to Africatown (Mobile County, Alabama) and Africville (Halifax, Nova Scotia) create and maintain cultural memory and resistance under erasure—and how route evidence from a Northeast–Maritime archive corridor, joined to community oral history and multimodal documentation, makes that comparative maintenance knowable. Africatown and Africville are linked but non-identical nodes of Black place-making under pressure: one a Clotilda-survivor settlement whose heritage politics unfold amid industrial and environmental harm; the other a community destroyed through state urban-renewal practice whose memorial and return politics remain active in Nova Scotia’s Black public sphere. The comparison is not thematic analogy alone. It is grounded in migration-route, legal, mutual-aid, church, and border-crossing records—fugitive advertisements and vigilance manuscripts, northern abolitionist print culture, Niagara Frontier papers, and Maritime municipal and photographic corpora—that connect southern settlement, northern free Black life, Great Lakes passage, and Maritime arrival. No Primary collection documents a shared kinship voyage; the fundable link is comparative anthropology of memory and resistance along that northern corridor.

Archive corridor as evidence path. Funded archival work is no longer a sprawling list of “relevant” collections. It is a sequenced residency itinerary—Philadelphia, then Massachusetts, then Buffalo/Niagara, then Nova Scotia—scheduled for July through early September 2027, with countable collection days at each stop. These residencies gather route evidence as types: Philadelphia vigilance and free Black mutual-aid manuscripts; Massachusetts anti-slavery print and vigilance records; Buffalo/Niagara church, Freedom Trail, and border-landscape documentation; plus digitized and historic-newspaper fugitive advertisements as print-culture Primary across the corridor. Archive stops are short, targeted residencies, not ethnography-at-every-city. Community depth concentrates afterward at the two named nodes.

Community evidence, then comparative analysis prep. From September through October 2027, Nova Scotia fieldwork centers oral histories with descendants, memorial stewards, and community historians in the Africville/Preston corridor; continued work in provincial photographic and early Black settlement holdings and municipal Africville source files; and consented still/AV documentation of memorial landscapes under protocol. From November through early December 2027, fieldwork in Africatown centers new interviews, listening/co-creation sessions where partners agree, and new photogrammetry and/or 360 documentation of memorial and settlement landscapes—distinct from any prior Alabama pilot visits, which remain preparation described only in the training section. Late December opens transcription and a comparative coding framework linking corridor archives to the two community corpora. Analysis preparation in that window is not writing-up living support.

Methods demoted to method. Multimodal practice—oral history AV, consented landscape imaging, and later return of materials—serves the empirical question. It is not the question. Any public-facing website or interpretive layer is an analysis and return practice after evidence is collected; it is not a funded DFG activity and does not organize the purpose statement.

Plan B matches Plan A’s question and total. If multi-city United States travel or the Alabama residency is blocked, Plan B collapses travel while preserving the comparative design: remote or hybrid oral histories with Africville and Africatown stewards; paid research assistance and digitization queries at the same corridor archives under the applicant’s direction; and, if needed, a Canada-only or United States-only residency variant. Equipment and fee lines shift toward remote recording, reproduction, and transcription. Plan B does not substitute podcast, VR, or website production for fieldwork. Plan A and Plan B are budgeted to the same total at or under the DFG maximum.

What this grant does not buy. Prior master’s research on racial terror memory, Congo Square, McCorkle, Hotel Lincoln, and Baton Rouge pilot work; prior multimodal publication; and related training relationships are preparation. They explain readiness; they are not funded activities in July–December 2027. Desk literatures on other Canadian settlement geographies may inform comparison; they do not justify multi-province Canada travel beyond Nova Scotia.

Readiness is clarified without turning preparation into the funded ask. Prior multimodal publication and site visits appear in the training section as method training and relational groundwork; parallel fellowship and residency experiences remain context for capacity, not deliverables or prestige cues in the double-anonymous narrative.

In short, the resubmission converts a methods-forward, platform-centered, multi-sited sketch into a six-month evidence plan with two named comparative nodes, a countable archive corridor, community oral history and co-creation at those nodes, multimodal documentation as method, and a Plan B that fails closed on the same anthropological question. That is the design this cycle asks Wenner-Gren to fund.

Q1 Purpose / main question (892 words / limit 1000)

Purpose

Black communities across the United States and Canada have long built places of refuge, kinship, and cultural continuity under conditions that work to erase those places—through enslavement and its afterlives, forced removal, urban renewal, industrial siting, and archival silencing. Two sites make that process especially sharp for comparative anthropological inquiry. Africatown, in Mobile County, Alabama, is a settlement founded by survivors of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to reach the United States; descendant and steward communities there continue to negotiate heritage, land, and memory amid industrial and environmental pressure. Africville, on the shore of Bedford Basin in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was a Black community destroyed in the 1960s through municipal “urban renewal”; memorialization, genealogy, and return politics remain central to how survivors’ descendants and allied stewards hold the place in public life.

These are not merely parallel stories of loss. They are linked through longer geographies of Black mobility, mutual aid, abolitionist print culture, church networks, Great Lakes border crossing, and Maritime arrival—routes that northern free Black communities and Canada-bound fugitives helped make legible in archives even as community memory often exceeds what repositories preserve. The purpose of this fieldwork is to document, comparatively, how memory and resistance are made and maintained at Africatown and Africville under erasure, and to do so with an evidence path that can show historical connection rather than only thematic resemblance.

Between 1 July and 31 December 2027, the project collects three interlocking corpora. First, short, targeted archive residencies along a Northeast–Maritime corridor—Philadelphia, Massachusetts, Buffalo/Niagara, then Nova Scotia—gather route evidence: free Black and abolition records; maritime and anti-slavery collections; border and Canada-bound flight materials; and Maritime files on displacement and memorialization. These residencies are countable collection periods, not ethnography at every city. Second, community oral history in the Africville/Preston corridor documents steward practices of memorialization, refusal, and return. Third, interviews, listening/co-creation sessions, and new photogrammetry and/or 360 documentation of memorial and settlement landscapes in Africatown document contemporary stewardship and material place—distinct from any prior Alabama pilot visits, which are preparation only. Late in the window, transcription begins and a comparative coding framework links corridor archives to the two community corpora. Analysis preparation is not writing-up support.

Multimodal documentation—recorded oral history, consented still and spatial imaging, and later return of materials to partner communities—is a method for making steward practice and landscape evidence knowable. It is not the research question, and it does not organize this grant around a website or public-media deliverable. Any interpretive or return layer that uses digital tools follows the collection of evidence; it is not what the DFG is asked to fund.

The project does not claim all of Black North America. Desk literatures on other Canadian settlement geographies may inform comparison; they do not expand the funded field itinerary beyond Nova Scotia and the named United States corridor and Alabama node.

Main research question

How do descendant and steward communities linked to Africatown (Alabama) and Africville (Nova Scotia) create and maintain cultural memory and resistance under erasure—and how does route evidence from a Philadelphia→Massachusetts→Buffalo/Niagara→Nova Scotia archive corridor, joined to community oral history and multimodal landscape documentation, make that comparative maintenance empirically knowable?

Sub-questions (three maximum)

1. Route / archive: What forms of mobility, mutual aid, legal constraint, and settlement appear in corridor collections that historically connect southern Black place-making to northern free Black life, Great Lakes passage, and Maritime arrival—and how do those records enable (or frustrate) a comparative reading of Africatown and Africville?

2. Steward practice: How do descendants, memorial workers, and heritage organizers at Africville/Preston and at Africatown enact remembrance, refusal, and care for place under ongoing erasure—and where do those practices converge or diverge across the two nodes?

3. Multimodal knowability (method sub-Q): What does consented audiovisual oral history and new landscape documentation make available for anthropological comparison that text-alone or decontextualized archival citation cannot—without treating multimodal output as the project’s purpose?

Why this question, why this design

Wenner-Gren DFG review rewards questions that evidence collected in a defined window can answer. The prior version of this project asked how technologies or research-creation might explore fugitive histories; that framing made methods the object. This Q1 inverts that relationship. The object is comparative memory-under-erasure at two named nodes. The archive corridor supplies the historical-geographic evidence path. Community oral history and landscape documentation supply steward practice and material place. Multimodal tools are instruments.

The design is also sized to six months. Archive days are estimated in residency ranges (approximately 10–12 in Philadelphia, 8–10 in Massachusetts, 8–10 in Buffalo/Niagara, plus continued Nova Scotia archive days). Community interviews are targeted in countable ranges (about 13 oral histories at each community node (26 total); 4 co-creation/listening sessions in Africatown if partners agree). Those numbers are planning targets for the methods section, not promises of saturation. Plan B, detailed elsewhere, preserves the same main question if travel collapses—via remote oral history, paid archive queries, and single-country residency variants—rather than substituting media production for evidence.

Anthropologically, the project sits where Black geographies, fugitivity studies, and multimodal ethnography meet heritage struggle: it asks what becomes knowable when southern settlement-under-erasure and Canadian memorial politics are read through migration-route archives and community voice, rather than held apart as national case studies. That is the contribution Q2 and Q6 will specify; Q1’s job is to keep the purpose empirical, comparative, and collectible between July and December 2027.

Q2 Scholarship / inspiration (937 words / limit 1000)

Earlier phases of this doctoral work used research-creation at Southern sites of Black memory, asking how media might hold fugitive histories (Smith and Hennessy 2020). This phase asks an evidence question in two settlements; any website is a later output, not the question.

This project’s comparative question emerged from a persistent gap in how anthropology and allied fields treat Black memory under erasure on either side of the US–Canada border. Scholarship on Africatown and on Africville is rich within national frames, yet the two nodes are rarely read together as linked but non-identical problems of place, stewardship, and archive. The fieldwork asks how descendant and steward communities at Africatown (Mobile County, Alabama) and Africville (Halifax, Nova Scotia) create and maintain cultural memory and resistance under erasure—and how route evidence along a Philadelphia→Massachusetts→Buffalo/Niagara→Nova Scotia corridor, joined to oral history and multimodal landscape documentation, makes that maintenance knowable. The dialogues below show how that question took shape and what empirical strategy it requires.

Africatown scholarship establishes the US node as African-founded settlement after the illegal Clotilda voyage, not as tourism anecdote. Diouf (2007) reconstructs captives’ African origins, Alabama enslavement, and African Town founding, grounding descendant institutions of church, school, and cemetery in settlement history rather than in late national discovery alone. Hurston’s Barracoon (Hurston 2018) supplies survivor oral narrative that precedes and exceeds institutional archive, modeling how testimony carries what repositories miss or spectacularize. Contemporary Heritage House exhibition practice and state wreck stewardship intensify descendant–museum–state negotiation over what counts as recoverable memory under industrial and environmental pressure. That literature clarifies last-voyage exceptionalism as a US heritage regime: spectacular recovery of ship and story can coexist with ongoing enclosure of living place. For anthropology, the stake is not only verifying the voyage but documenting how steward communities maintain cultural memory when wreck custody, exhibition partnership, and landscape harm pull in different directions.

Africville literatures establish a different Canadian erasure mechanism. Clairmont and Magill’s Relocation Report (Clairmont and Magill 1971) and Africville: The Life and Death of a Canadian Black Community (Clairmont and Magill 1974) document municipal expropriation under “planned social change,” while Nelson (2008) analyzes racist spatial management, slum discourse, and the politics of remembering and forgetting. Memorial infrastructures—museum practice in a replica church, National Historic Site designation, municipal apology and settlement archives, and the Bob Brooks photographic corpus held in provincial archives—show how clearance produces pilgrimage forms and unfinished redress. Pairing these debates with Africatown refuses forced analogy: US afterlife-of-slavery heritage regimes and Canadian municipal clearance/memorial regimes organize what can be claimed, archived, and refused differently. The comparative hinge is memory politics, not interchangeable loss narratives.

Black geographies supply the spatial analytic that makes both nodes anthropological rather than only heritage-tourism cases. McKittrick (2006) theorizes cartographies of struggle and absented presence; McKittrick (2011) elaborates a Black sense of place under racial violence; McKittrick and Woods (2007) gather placemaking under racial capitalism as political practice. Nelson (2008) already seats Canadian Black geography inside Africville debates, preventing a US-only theoretical frame as the corridor ends in Halifax. Read together, Africatown’s industrialized enclosure and Africville’s razing appear as geographic technologies of racialization and as sites where Black sense of place is continually remade through stewardship, memorial labor, and refusal.

Fugitivity and the afterlife of slavery sharpen “under erasure” as more than commemorative surface. Hartman (1997) tracks ongoing subjection beyond formal emancipation; Lose Your Mother (Hartman 2007) models diasporic estrangement along slave routes—useful as foil where Clotilda descendants and Africville family geographies hold named kin that many Atlantic archives deny. “Venus in Two Acts” (Hartman 2008) remains the critical method for reading archival violence when municipal and state records over-speak community voice—especially Halifax council and compensation files beside Brooks photographs, or Mobile-area heritage infrastructures beside descendant stewardship. Wayward Lives (Hartman 2019) may inform northern urban corridor nodes carefully, without romanticizing flight or forcing northern waywardness onto Africatown settlement continuity. These works inspire the project’s insistence that archives are both resource and problem: they make route evidence available and they encode the silencing against which steward practice works.

What remained missing was an evidence strategy that could join these dialogues without collapsing them into thematic resemblance or into a digital platform as the object of inquiry. Multimodal anthropology treats media practice as collaborative and public knowledge-making rather than illustration (Collins, Durington and Gill 2017); this project departs from platform-centred uses by binding audiovisual oral history and landscape documentation to countable corridor evidence. Corridor archives—vigilance manuscripts and free Black mutual-aid papers in Philadelphia; northern abolitionist print and vigilance records in Massachusetts; Niagara Frontier church and Freedom Trail materials; Nova Scotia provincial and municipal Africville corpora—make mobility, aid, legal constraint, and Maritime settlement empirically countable. Fugitive advertisements and abolitionist print culture further show how northern surveillance and mutual aid co-produced kinetic memory of flight without reducing Africville to Underground Railroad terminus mythology alone. These collections do not prove a shared kinship voyage between Africatown and Africville; they make comparative anthropology of memory and resistance researchable along historically linked route infrastructures. The design builds on ethnographic and archival approaches to heritage narration at paired memory sites and to the social life of archives under silencing, while keeping multimodal oral history and landscape documentation as instruments for steward practice and material place—not as the contribution itself.

The project therefore advances anthropology of race, place, and memory by treating Africatown and Africville as paired empirical problems whose difference is analytically productive, and by collecting corridor Primary corpora with community voice so that erasure regimes can be compared rather than only described in parallel. That is the scholarly dialogue this fieldwork enters and the evidence path through which it answers.

Q3A Plan A methodology (954 words / limit 1000; coherence pass Oct 29)

Plan A overview

Plan A collects new evidence between 1 July and 31 December 2027 to answer Q1: how descendant and steward communities linked to Africatown (Alabama) and Africville (Nova Scotia) create and maintain cultural memory and resistance under erasure, and how route evidence from a Philadelphia→Massachusetts→Buffalo/Niagara→Nova Scotia archive corridor, joined to community oral history and multimodal landscape documentation, makes that maintenance knowable.

Method order is fixed: (1) short archive residencies gathering corridor Primary corpora; (2) Africville/Preston oral history paired with Nova Scotia provincial and municipal holdings; (3) Africatown interviews, co-creation, and new landscape documentation; (4) late-December transcription and comparative coding prep. Multimodal practice—oral-history AV, consented still and spatial imaging—is an instrument, not the question; this plan does not fund a website or public-media deliverable. Prior pilot work and publication are preparation only (Q4)—not funded Plan A activity.

Phase 1 — July–early September 2027: Northeast archive corridor (~8–9 weeks)

Three sequenced residencies gather route evidence as collection types. Stops are countable archive days, not ethnography-at-every-city.

Philadelphia (~10–12 archive days). Pull free Black mutual-aid, abolition, and vigilance manuscripts documenting named freedom-seeker cases and organizational aid. Core types: William Still’s Journal C of the Underground Railroad (Historical Society of Pennsylvania) and Pennsylvania Abolition Society papers (Collection 490, including Vigilance Committee minutes). Optional Library Company Afro-Americana prints only if HSP leaves print gaps. Outputs: annotated inventory keyed to Africatown↔︎Africville comparison; reproduction-permission log.

Massachusetts (~8–10 archive days). Pull northern abolitionist print culture and vigilance organizational records. Core types: Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League records, 1846–1887 (Massachusetts Historical Society, Ms. N-1875; color digital facsimiles; related 1855 runaway broadside); Boston Public Library Anti-Slavery Collection correspondence, society records, and The Liberator (digitized discovery aid; on-site for restricted items). Fugitive advertisements via Freedom on the Move and Chronicling America are print-culture Primary across corridor stops—not a database this grant will build. Outputs: inventory of vigilance/print evidence of northern refuge and typographic surveillance of flight.

Buffalo / Niagara (~8–10 archive days). Pull Great Lakes border and Canada-bound institutional evidence. Core types: Buffalo Quarters Historical Society / Lillion Batchelor papers (Monroe Fordham Regional History Center—Freedom Trail and Niagara River crossing documentation); Bethel A.M.E. and Michigan Street corridor church papers; Buffalo & Erie County Public Library African American History / Miles Center holdings and Underground Railroad on the Niagara Frontier guides. Consented site documentation at Michigan Street Baptist Church (Network to Freedom) and Freedom Crossing Monument landscape (Lewiston) as Primary landscape notes. Salem Chapel BME (St. Catharines) only if access is confirmed, within the two budgeted Niagara car-rental days. Outputs: border-station inventory linking Niagara records to Maritime terminus questions.

Phase 2 — September–October 2027: Africville / Preston + Nova Scotia archives (~6–7 weeks)

Arrive with corridor questions sharpened. Community depth concentrates here.

Oral history (about 13 interviews). Descendants, memorial stewards, and community historians in the Africville/Preston corridor (North Preston / East Preston / Cherry Brook as relevant). Candidate contacts: Africville Genealogy Society / Africville Heritage Trust / Museum protocols; Black Cultural Centre research-room rules. Institutional research ethics and local community protocols precede recruitment; consent, revocation, and return terms logged per interview.

Archive days (~8–12). Nova Scotia Archives Bob Brooks Africville photographic corpus (accession 1989-468 vol. 16); African Nova Scotians in the Age of Slavery and Abolition / Book of Negroes as long-durée Canadian slavery and early settlement Primary; Halifax Municipal Archives Africville Source Guide (council/Board of Control series 102-1A/102-1B; 1909 well petition HMA 102-1B-1909-09; Rose Report 1963; Stephenson Report 1957; property map P500/46 (1962); relocation compensation files—FOIPOP/restricted flagged). Pair municipal gaze critically with Brooks and oral accounts. Dalhousie digitized Africville Relocation Report as supplement.

Landscape documentation. Consented still/AV and optional 360 of Seaview Memorial Park / museum memorial architecture under Trust protocols. Brooks images remain Archives-licensed study copies—not free publication assets.

Phase 3 — November–early December 2027: Africatown community node (~6–7 weeks)

Interviews (about 13) and co-creation (4 sessions if partners agree). Descendants, heritage stewards, and organizers recruited through descendant-association and heritage-preservation partners, subject to their agreement. Sessions document stewardship practice, erasure under industrial/environmental pressure, and community memory relative to wreck/heritage infrastructures (Africatown Heritage House / Clotilda: The Exhibition; Alabama Historical Commission public record, by appointment). Roche-era 1914 public-domain portraits and wreck photograph serve as historical visual foil—not substitutes for restricted Heritage House / AHC photography.

New landscape documentation. Photogrammetry and/or 360 of memorial and settlement landscapes under research protocol and local AV/drone rules, using my own drone (no equipment cost requested)—distinct from any prior Alabama pilot visits. Fieldnotes pair material landscape to stewardship narrative.

Late December. Transcription kickoff; comparative coding linking Phase 1 corridor inventories to Africville and Africatown oral/landscape corpora (erasure narration; church/mutual aid; landscape claim; stewardship under municipal vs industrial regimes). Analysis prep only—no writing-up living costs.

Feasibility timeline. One continuous field period, not separate trips home: Jul–early Sep Northeast archives (≈30 archive days); Sep–Oct Nova Scotia (≈13 interviews, 8–12 archive days); Nov–early Dec Africatown (≈13 interviews, 4 sessions; 26 interviews total); mid–late Dec transcription and coding from home. Each phase is costed line by line in the Plan A budget.

Countable products: annotated collection inventories; interview transcripts/consent logs; landscape documentation notes; comparative coding memos. Not a website launch.

Ethics / access. The project’s institutional research ethics approval is active; a renewal and an amendment adding the Africatown and Africville/Preston sites and drone documentation will be approved by 30 April 2027, before fieldwork. Community entry letters, archive user agreements and reproduction permissions, and site AV/drone consent are expected by 30 June 2027.

Funding. The Plan A budget requests the full cost of the activities above; the project does not depend on other awards and remains feasible if they are not forthcoming.

Plan B (Q3B) preserves this same question and the same budget total if multi-city United States travel or the Alabama residency is blocked.

Q3B Plan B methodology (820 words / limit 1000; coherence pass Oct 29)

Plan B overview

Plan B answers the same comparative question as Plan A (Q1 / Q3A): how descendant and steward communities linked to Africatown (Alabama) and Africville (Nova Scotia) create and maintain cultural memory and resistance under erasure, and how route evidence from the Philadelphia→Massachusetts→Buffalo/Niagara→Nova Scotia archive corridor, joined to community oral history and multimodal documentation, makes that maintenance knowable.

Plan B activates if multi-city United States travel, the Alabama residency, cross-border logistics, or health/access barriers block Plan A’s sequenced corridor. It collapses travel while preserving the evidence genres—corridor Primary corpora, Africville/Preston and Africatown oral history, and consented landscape/visual documentation as method. It does not substitute podcast, VR, website, or other public-media production for fieldwork. Plan B is budgeted to the same total as Plan A (US$24,900); because research proceeds remotely, it also includes two terms of doctoral tuition, and dollars move from multi-city travel and lodging into remote recording support, paid archive research assistance, reproduction/digitization fees, and transcription.

Prior master’s research on racial terror memory, Congo Square, McCorkle, Hotel Lincoln, and Baton Rouge pilot work remain preparation only—not funded Plan B activity.

Trigger conditions

Plan B is used when one or more of the following hold: (1) multi-stop Northeast residency travel is blocked or unsafe; (2) Alabama community residency cannot proceed on schedule; (3) Canada entry or Nova Scotia community access is delayed beyond the funded window’s first half; (4) archive reading-room closures force remote query protocols. Partial triggers produce hybrid variants (below) rather than abandoning the comparative design.

Evidence path under collapsed travel (Jul–Dec 2027)

1. Remote / hybrid oral history (both nodes). Conduct 24 budgeted interviews, about 12 per node, plus listening sessions across Africville/Preston and Africatown steward networks—matching Plan A’s combined community targets, with schedule flexibility for partner bandwidth. Prefer synchronous encrypted video with backup phone audio; ship or loan remote recording kits where partners agree. A paid community liaison at each node schedules sessions and helps participants with loaned kits; I conduct every interview and session myself. Consent, revocation, and return-of-materials protocols match Plan A ethics; the existing institutional ethics approval will be amended to cover remote modalities before 1 July 2027. Co-creation/listening sessions (~3–5) proceed online or hybrid if Africatown partners prefer that format.

2. Paid archive queries and digitization at the same corridor repositories. The applicant remains researcher-of-record and directs query lists, finding-aid targets, and reproduction orders. Budget funds paid research assistance and/or institutional reproduction fees at: Philadelphia (Still Journal C / Pennsylvania Abolition Society Collection 490 types); Massachusetts (Anti-Man-Hunting League Ms. N-1875 digital facsimiles; BPL Anti-Slavery / Liberator pulls); Buffalo/Niagara (Batchelor / Buffalo Quarters papers; Miles Center / Monroe Fordham church and Freedom Trail materials); Nova Scotia (Brooks 1989-468 study copies under Archives licensing; Halifax Municipal Africville Source Guide digitized series; Book of Negroes / Age of Slavery and Abolition portals). Freedom on the Move and Chronicling America remain desk-accessible print-culture Primary. Countable products: directed query logs, received digital surrogates, annotated inventories keyed to the same evidence↔︎question map as Q3A.

3. Single-country residency variants. If only United States multi-city travel fails, concentrate a shorter Nova Scotia residency (Africville/Preston oral history + NS/Halifax municipal archive days) and run Africatown interviews remote/hybrid. If only Canada travel fails, reverse: Alabama community residency + remote Africville oral history + paid NS archive queries. The submitted Plan B budget is fully remote; any single-country residency would be funded only by a reallocation request to the Foundation within the same total. If both community residencies fail, maximize remote oral history at both nodes and deepen paid corridor digitization—still targeting inventories sufficient for comparative coding of erasure, stewardship, church/mutual aid, and landscape claim.

4. Multimodal as instrument, not deliverable. Landscape evidence under Plan B draws on: (a) partner-consented photographs or short AV already held by stewards; (b) researcher-generated documentation during any single-country visit that proceeds; (c) public-domain / openly licensed historical visuals (e.g., Roche 1914 Africatown portraits/wreck; LOC corridor maps/lithographs) used in analysis notes under stated rights. No Plan B line item buys a website, interactive exhibit, or VR build.

Timeline (same window)

• Jul–early Sep: Launch paid archive query packages for Philadelphia, Massachusetts, and Buffalo/Niagara collection types; begin remote Africatown and Africville recruitment under ethics protocols; desk work on FOTM/Chronicling America and digitized NS portals.
• Sep–Oct: Priority Africville/Preston remote or NS-only oral histories; Halifax Municipal / Brooks reproduction orders; coding memos on municipal-erasure corpora.
• Nov–Dec: Priority Africatown remote/hybrid interviews and co-creation; Alabama public-record / Heritage House interpretive materials under media policy; late-December transcription and comparative coding prep matching Plan A’s analysis products.

What Plan B preserves / refuses

Preserves: same Q; Africatown↔︎Africville comparative spine; corridor collection types; countable inventories, transcripts, and coding memos; same budget total. Refuses: media-production contingency; expanding to multi-province Canada desk-tourism; treating digitization as a public platform deliverable; prestige naming of institutions or residencies in this double-anonymous answer.

Plan B fails closed on evidence for the anthropological question—not open onto a different project.

Q4 Why you (791 words / limit 1000)

I am prepared to carry out this six-month evidence plan because of sustained commitment to Black memory under erasure, demonstrated multimodal and archival skill used as preparation rather than as the funded ask, and relationships and permissions timed to the July–December 2027 window.

Personal and scholarly commitment. Kinship discovery of racial terror in Alabama lineage oriented me early to how descendant communities hold place when official memory is late, partial, or spectacular. Master’s research on racial-terror memory in Alabama trained oral-history interviewing, archival triangulation, and ethics of care with traumatic narration. Pilot visits to memorial and settlement landscapes in Alabama and the US South—including Congo Square, McCorkle/Horton campus memory politics, Hotel Lincoln / South Baton Rouge documentation, and related Baton Rouge work—taught entry protocols, listening practice, and the difference between experiential presence and countable comparative evidence. Those visits and a 2024 peer-reviewed multimodal anthropology publication are preparation: they prove method readiness and relational groundwork. They do not answer the Africatown↔︎Africville comparative question and are not funded Plan A activity. Living and studying in Canada further oriented me to African Nova Scotian and Black Canadian settlement literatures as desk preparation for Africville/Preston fieldwork, without substituting desk reading for community oral history. Early creative and community-based work with incarcerated youth and with descendant-linked literary heritage projects also shaped my practice of listening under constrained conditions; those experiences inform ethics, not Plan A deliverables. Following fugitive anthropology’s point that “the field travels within our bodies” (Berry et al. 2017), I bring tested field practice to this design. Pilot fieldwork at four Southern sites of Black memory, one in partnership with a local community organization, tested drone photogrammetry, 360° documentation and consented oral-history recording, and produced a peer-reviewed article in multimodal anthropology. Earlier graduate training in journalism produced an oral history of racial terror in the Deep South, and a competitive national doctoral scholarship has supported my travel between the US South and Canada.

Training and skills for Plan A. Doctoral training joins anthropological advising on race, place, and heritage with multimodal method training—oral-history AV, consented still and spatial imaging, photogrammetry/360 practice, secure data handling, and transcription/coding workflows. Anthropology affiliation through doctoral advising keeps the comparative question empirical and field-sized within Black geographies, fugitivity studies, and heritage ethnography. I am a trained drone operator and field documentarian experienced in memorial-site AV under local rules; those tools appear in Plan A only as instruments for new Africatown landscape documentation and consented Africville memorial imaging, not as project purpose. Archival literacy for vigilance manuscripts, abolitionist print culture, municipal clearance files, and photographic corpora has been developed through prior northeastern and Canadian collection work and systematic finding-aid study for the Philadelphia→Massachusetts→Buffalo/Niagara→Nova Scotia itinerary. Parallel northern-slavery and corridor research experiences sharpened the evidentiary genres this DFG will collect—fugitive advertisements, vigilance journals, church and mutual-aid papers, municipal and photographic Africville records—without turning any residency or fellowship into the deliverable of this grant. Technical collaborators support equipment logistics only as needed.

Community relationships and collaborators. At Africville/Preston, entry proceeds through genealogy society, heritage trust/museum, and Black cultural centre research protocols. At Africatown, relationships are being cultivated with descendant association and heritage preservation partners and with public heritage infrastructures that narrate Clotilda/Africatown history. Personnel Yes: local collaborators may include community historians and museum/heritage staff as knowledge holders (not unpaid labor), and, where budgets allow, paid archive research assistance under my direction for query lists and reproduction orders. Co-creation and listening sessions in Africatown (approximately 3–5 if partners agree) follow partner preference on format, credit, and return. Collaborators remain general in this double-anonymous answer; named letters of support and scopes of work will be available to the Foundation if awarded.

Ethics and remaining permissions. Institutional research ethics approval for multi-sited oral history and audiovisual documentation is active. A renewal and an amendment adding the Africatown and Africville/Preston sites, drone documentation, remote/hybrid modalities (Plan B) and new landscape imaging protocols will be approved by 30 April 2027, before fieldwork. Remaining permissions—community entry letters, archive user agreements and reproduction permissions, FOIPOP pathways for restricted Halifax compensation files, and site AV/drone consent under municipal and community rules—are expected by 30 June 2027. Restricted materials will be logged; no human remains research is planned.

Feasibility for the funded window. The design is sized to countable archive days and interview targets already specified in Plan A. Prior multimodal publication and pilot visits reduce start-up risk: consent language, recording workflows, and spatial documentation practice are tested. What remains is new collection—corridor inventories, Africville/Preston oral history paired with Nova Scotia holdings, Africatown interviews and co-creation, and new landscape documentation—followed by late-December transcription and comparative coding prep. That is the work I am positioned and committed to complete between 1 July and 31 December 2027 in the United States and Canada.

Q5 Ethics (469 words / limit 500; drone wording added Oct 29)

The most salient ethical issues concern consent and community protocols at Africatown and Africville/Preston; power and access in restricted archives; landscape audiovisual and drone documentation at memorial sites; and return of materials to steward communities. Institutional research ethics approval is active; a renewal and an amendment adding the Africatown and Africville/Preston sites and drone documentation will be approved by 30 April 2027, before fieldwork; remaining community entry letters, archive agreements, FOIPOP pathways, and site AV permissions are expected by 30 June 2027.

Consent and community protocols. Recruitment follows genealogy society, heritage trust/museum, and descendant-association entry paths—not cold approaches to trauma narrators. Informed consent is ongoing: participants may refuse questions, pause recording, revoke use of quotes or images, or decline co-creation credit or naming. Oral histories treat displacement (Africville) and industrial/environmental harm (Africatown) as living injury, not closed past; content warnings and referral resources are available when interviews surface distress. Opacity and refusal are data ethics, not obstacles: steward communities may withhold places, names, ceremonies, or images from research circulation without jeopardizing partnership. Researcher positionality—Alabama kinship ties to racial terror memory and outsider status in Nova Scotia descendant networks—will be named in consent conversations so participants can calibrate what they share.

Archives and FOIPOP. Corridor and Nova Scotia repositories hold uneven, sometimes extractive records of Black life. I will honor user agreements, reproduction licenses, and embargoes; Bob Brooks study copies and Heritage House / wreck-related imagery require permission and will not be treated as free publication assets. Halifax Municipal compensation and related files may require FOIPOP or restricted access; delays are built into Plan A and Plan B rather than forcing premature citation. Reading municipal and state records against community voice follows critical archival practice: repositories document erasure regimes and must not overwrite steward narration.

Landscape AV / drone. Photogrammetry, 360, still photography, and drone flights, which I use throughout fieldwork, proceed only with site steward consent and under FAA Part 107 in the United States, Transport Canada’s Canadian Aviation Regulations Part IX in Canada (certified pilot, registered drone, special flight certificate where required), and memorial-site rules. Every flight follows a pre-flight safety checklist and avoids people, ceremonies and restricted airspace. No imaging of private homes, graves beyond publicly agreed memorial frames, or ceremonies without explicit permission. Drones and spatial imaging are instruments for consented landscape evidence, not spectacle or website content. Human remains research is not part of this project.

Return and benefit. Transcripts, agreed stills, and inventory notes return to partners under terms they set; any later interpretive layer is analysis and return after evidence collection, not a funded public-media deliverable. Participant honoraria and travel support are budgeted. Data are stored encrypted with tiered access; community-restricted files stay out of open deposit. Ethics here means accountability to living stewards while collecting countable evidence for the comparative anthropological question.

Q6 Contribution / audiences / why now (686 words / limit 750)

This project contributes to anthropological traditions of Black geographies, fugitivity studies, and multimodal anthropology of heritage and memory by making Africatown and Africville comparatively knowable through countable corridor evidence and community oral history—without treating multimodal technology as the object of inquiry. Methodologically, it extends multimodal anthropology’s invitation to collaborative, public knowledge-making (Collins, Durington and Gill 2017) into comparative heritage fieldwork, where consented audiovisual testimony and landscape documentation become evidence that is coded alongside archives.

Traditions entered. Black geographic scholarship has shown space as a technology of racialization and as a Black sense of place under violence (McKittrick 2006; McKittrick 2011; McKittrick and Woods 2007). Africatown historiography and Africville relocation sociology and geography (Diouf 2007; Clairmont and Magill 1971, 1974; Nelson 2008) document two national memory regimes that anthropology rarely holds in one empirical frame. Work on the afterlife of slavery and archival violence (Hartman 1997; Hartman 2008) supplies method for reading municipal and state records beside steward voice. Peer Dissertation Fieldwork designs on the social life of archives under silencing, heritage narration at paired slavery-memory sites, Black placemaking under state racialization, diaspora settlement and belonging across nodes, and Black heritage landscapes under industrial harm demonstrate that Wenner-Gren already funds empirical collection on memory infrastructures. This corridor plan extends those concerns across the US–Canada border with a sized six-month collection calendar: archive residencies that inventory route evidence; oral history with memorial stewards; and consented landscape documentation as method, not deliverable.

New insight. Reading Africatown and Africville together along a northern archive corridor shows how Black memory under erasure is organized differently by US last-voyage/descendant heritage regimes and Canadian municipal clearance/memorial regimes—and how corridor collections of vigilance manuscripts, abolitionist print, Niagara Frontier church and Freedom Trail records, and Nova Scotia municipal and photographic corpora both enable and constrain that comparison. The insight is comparative and evidentiary: steward practices of remembrance, refusal, and care for place become anthropologically accountable when route archives, oral history, and consented landscape documentation are coded together for erasure narration, church/mutual aid, landscape claim, and stewardship under municipal versus industrial regimes. Multimodal documentation is the instrument that makes steward practice and material place jointly analyzable; it is not the contribution, and no website or public-media product organizes the claim. The project thus advances anthropology by specifying how cross-border comparison works when Primary corpora and community voice are collected on the same calendar—rather than by promising a new platform for representing fugitivity.

Audiences. Anthropologists of race, place, archives, and difficult heritage; Black studies and Black geographies readers working the US–Canada border; public historians and community heritage institutions at both nodes, who receive reciprocal reporting and returned materials rather than a website-as-deliverable; and Canadian and US scholars who seldom share a comparative frame for Africville and Africatown. Reciprocity to genealogy societies, museums, and descendant stewards is ethical obligation and knowledge practice, timed to partner protocols rather than to a launch schedule.

The stakes are concrete: enslaved Africans and their descendants reached uneven degrees of liberation that remain poorly understood, and the places they built, rival geographies of movement and refusal (Camp 2004), are the ones most exposed to demolition, relocation and archival silence.

Why now. Africatown Heritage House / Clotilda exhibition-era politics intensify descendant–museum–state negotiation under industrial pressure. Africville apology/settlement aftermath and museum/National Historic Site pilgrimage remain unfinished justice in public memory. Corridor tourism and print culture often flatten Canadian Black settlement into Underground Railroad terminus myth, even as provincial archives document slavery and African Nova Scotian presence that precede that myth. A July–December 2027 DFG window fits a finite multi-city archival calendar and two community residencies within the maximum award—buying collection of evidence when heritage struggle at both nodes is publicly acute and still under-documented comparatively.

The project’s claim is precise rather than sweeping. It offers a sized, answerable contribution: empirical proof that comparative anthropology of Black memory under erasure can move when southern settlement-under-pressure and Canadian memorial politics are researched through migration-route archives and community voice, rather than held apart as national case studies or collapsed into a media platform. That is the insight this fieldwork is designed to produce between July and December 2027.

Page 10: Personal Information (optional)

Gender identity, pronouns, sexual identity, disability, caregiving, parents’ education, income insecurity, race/ethnicity (US citizens), marginalized-group status (non-US/multiple citizens, 2,500 chars), Indigenous affiliation (2,500 chars), how you heard about WG, and where you found guidance. This is all Tylar’s to answer, and none of it goes to reviewers. Nothing is drafted here on purpose.

Page 11: Disclosure, attachments, certification

There’s no CV upload and no reference letters. WG asks applicants not to send transcripts, letters, publications or other extra material.

Wenner-Gren DFG — COHERENCE PASS (DRAFT, Oct 29, 2026 ~4:45 PM ET, Grant_Grafter)

Due Sun Nov 1. This pass applies Donna Auston’s advice that the budget and the Jul–Dec 2027 period should read as one with the RQs and methods, plus the budget rules in ../wg-dfg-examples-2026-10-29.md (WG DFG Application Guide). Edits are applied in WG-FINAL-PASTE-PACK.md (backup: final/WG-FINAL-PASTE-PACK.bak-20261029b.md). Nothing has been submitted.

1. Plan A: every line → method · site · month (total US$24,900)

Re-summed: the 26 lines total $24,900. The 6 legs are priced individually in the pack’s airfare table.

2. Flags (found → fix)

Method with no budget line 1. Drone (Q3A, Q4, Q5) has no cost. → FIXED: Q3A now says “using my own drone (no equipment cost requested)”. Registration/certificate fees (FAA $5, TC ~$15) are not budgeted [TYLAR: OK to absorb]. 2. Salem Chapel, St. Catharines (Q3A) had no travel line. → FIXED: covered “within the two budgeted Niagara car-rental days”. 3. Plan B single-country residency variants (Q3B §3) had no travel or lodging lines. → FIXED: Q3B now says the submitted Plan B budget is fully remote, and any residency would need a reallocation request within the same total. 4. Plan B tuition ($1,700) wasn’t mentioned in Q3B. → FIXED: one clause added.

Count mismatches 5. Interviews: Q3A said ~10–14 per site; the budget has 26 (13 per site). → FIXED: Q3A “about 13”; Q3B “about 12 per node; 24 budgeted”. 6. Co-creation: Q3A said ~3–5 sessions; the budget has 4. → FIXED: “4 sessions”.

Budget rule violations (WG guide) 7. Plan B “image permissions $400”: these are publication-type costs, which WG excludes (reproduction of photographs for publication). → FIXED: removed; reproduction is now labelled “research study copies only” ($2,800). The $400 moved to community liaisons (106 → 114 hrs, $5,700). 8. Lines with no estimate shown: Fuel (“est.”) and Plan B kit shipping (“est.”). → FIXED: ~6.5 wks x ~$36 = $234; 4 kits x 2 shipments x ~$41.25 = $330. 9. Q3A feasibility timeline: the phases were dated but there was no explicit timeline, and nothing said why it isn’t multiple trips. → FIXED: a “Feasibility timeline” paragraph was added (one continuous field period, no trips home). Q3A is 953/1000 words. 10. Plan B transcription: 36 hrs, but no applicant/assistant split is stated as WG asks. → OPEN: add “applicant does first-pass machine transcripts; professional verbatim only for difficult remote audio” [TYLAR: OK?].

Checks that pass - Plan A = Plan B = US$24,900 (re-summed after edits) ≤ $25,000 ✓ - No contingency, misc, overhead, salary or publication lines ✓ - Medical: Plan A $560 ≤ 4.5 x $125 = $562.50 ✓; Plan B has none (remote) ✓ - Equipment: no single or compound item ≥ $2,500, so no donation statement is needed. If a drone/LiDAR kit is ever added it counts as one item; a kit ≥ $2,500 would need a donation statement. None is requested now ✓ - Per diem $30/day is justified against actual costs ✓; RA wages are justified by site ✓

3. Page 6 permits text (replaces the Oct 29 morning version)

—– PASTE START —– Simon Fraser University Research Ethics Board approval 30003092 (renewed 5 June 2026; PI Dr. Kate Hennessy; expires 23 June 2027). Before fieldwork begins, a renewal and an amendment adding the Africatown and Africville/Preston sites and drone work will be approved by 30 April 2027 [filing date: PhD Track/Kate to confirm]. Drone flights: FAA Part 107 remote pilot certificate and FAA registration for US sites [TYLAR: numbers]; Transport Canada pilot certificate and registration for Canadian sites, with a Special Flight Operations Certificate where required [TYLAR: numbers]; landowner, site-steward and municipal permission at each site. Archive user agreements and reproduction permissions; FOIPOP requests for restricted Halifax files; community entry agreements in Africatown and Africville/Preston. —– PASTE END —– Date all permits in hand: [PhD Track/Kate to confirm; must be before 07/01/2027].

4. Title (LOCKED Nov 1) + abstract

• Memory under Erasure from Africatown to Africville (7 words).

Abstract ( 156 words; limit 200): —– PASTE START: abstract —– Black communities across the United States and Canada have long built places of refuge and remembrance under conditions designed to erase them. This anthropological project asks how descendant and steward communities linked to Africatown, Alabama, and Africville, Nova Scotia, create and maintain cultural memory and resistance under erasure. Africatown, a settlement founded by survivors of the last known slave ship, negotiates heritage amid industrial pressure; Africville, destroyed through urban renewal, lives on in active memorial politics. The two are studied as comparative nodes rather than isolated cases. From July to December 2027, fieldwork follows a corridor through Philadelphia, Massachusetts, Buffalo/Niagara and Nova Scotia to gather archival route evidence of free Black life, abolition networks and border crossing, then documents present-day remembrance through consent-based oral histories and multimodal landscape documentation with Africville/Preston and Africatown communities. The study advances anthropological debates on fugitivity and Black geographies by making US–Canada settlement memory comparatively knowable through defined sites and countable evidence. —– PASTE END: abstract —–

5. GenAI follow-up answer (if WG asks for detail; Tylar’s base answer stays the exact sentence)

—– PASTE START: GenAI detail —– AI tools were used for brainstorming and synthesis as a thought partner, not for conducting the research. Tools: [TYLAR: e.g., ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity, versions]. Prompts: I asked tools to restructure my own existing proposal text around one research question, to list public finding aids for named repositories, to compare my draft against the Foundation’s published application guide, and to check word counts and budget arithmetic [TYLAR: confirm or edit]. Tasks: summarizing public program guidance; drafting and line-editing from my own notes and prior proposal; organizing budget tables. All research questions, sites, community relationships, interviews and fieldwork are my own. Accuracy: I checked every cited work against the publication itself, confirmed each archive collection and call number on the repository’s own page, recalculated budget figures, and rewrote the text in my own voice [TYLAR: describe your actual checks]. —– PASTE END —–

6. Comps (framing only, not cited)

Funded DFG projects in a similar register: Stevens (2024: 3D, photogrammetry and VR with Black heritage communities across borders) and Laurore (2023: two-country diaspora heritage comparison). They show WG funds immersive digital methods as instruments and two-country Black heritage comparisons. Keep our Q3A framing the same way. The tDAR proposals were not used or cited.

7. Open items [TYLAR / PhD Track]

1. Title: Option 1 or 2.
2. Date the REB renewal + amendment will be approved [PhD Track/Kate].
3. FAA Part 107 and Transport Canada certificate/registration numbers (and an SFOC if any).
4. OK to absorb drone registration fees (unbudgeted).
5. Plan B transcription split sentence (flag 10).
6. GenAI detail: the tools used and your actual checks.
7. Unchanged from WG-CLOSEOUT §3b: the four prior-support outcomes, continuing-fee confirmation, Kate’s middle name, the community wording, a visa, degree years, institutional funding, demographics, budget PDF uploads, and the final tick/CAPTCHA/Submit.

1. Source map

2. Paste-ready inserts (applied, green in the review)

a) Q2 lineage bridge (44 words), placed before Q2’s first paragraph: > Earlier phases of this doctoral work used research-creation at Southern sites of Black memory, asking how media might hold fugitive histories (Smith and Hennessy 2020). This phase asks an evidence question in two settlements; any website is a later output, not the question.

b) Q4 qualifications (about 89 words), appended to “Personal and scholarly commitment”: > Following fugitive anthropology’s point that “the field travels within our bodies” (Berry et al. 2017), I bring tested field practice to this design. Pilot fieldwork at four Southern sites of Black memory, one in partnership with a local community organization, tested drone photogrammetry, 360° documentation and consented oral-history recording, and produced a peer-reviewed article in multimodal anthropology. Earlier graduate training in journalism produced an oral history of racial terror in the Deep South, and a competitive national doctoral scholarship has supported my travel between the US South and Canada.

c) Q6 stakes (42 words), placed before “Why now.”: > The stakes are concrete: enslaved Africans and their descendants reached uneven degrees of liberation that remain poorly understood, and the places they built, rival geographies of movement and refusal (Camp 2004), are the ones most exposed to demolition, relocation and archival silence.

d) Bibliography (3 additions, each cited once; one Kate-authored source): - Berry, Maya J., Claudia Chávez Argüelles, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada. 2017. “Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (4): 537–65. (Q4) - Camp, Stephanie M. H. 2004. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. (Q6) - Smith, Trudi Lynn, and Kate Hennessy. 2020. “Anarchival Materiality in Film Archives: Toward an Anthropology of the Multimodal.” Visual Anthropology Review 36 (1): 113–36. (Q2)

Citing your supervisor’s paper is normal scholarship and doesn’t identify you, but it’s the only Hennessy source. Don’t add any more.

3. Word counts (pack blocks, tags stripped)

No trimming is needed.

4. What was changed

Backup: backups/20261101-pull-1237/. Inserts are in WG-FINAL-PASTE-PACK.md (green spans) and review/src.md (green). Clean text without tags is in final/P9-2-Q2.txt, P9-4-Q4.txt and P9-6-Q6.txt, rewritten from the pack. The old P9 files were stale (Q2 had 858 words against the pack’s 894). The 3 entries were added to final/WG-bibliography.md. Re-export WG-bibliography.pdf before uploading; the PDF itself was not regenerated. Review: /workspace/WG-REVIEW.html.

5. Tylar’s remaining blanks, pre-filled from the 4 PDFs