Wenner-Gren DFG, Nov 1 2026: final paste pack (pages 9–11): 3-SITE REWRITE, Vanier-voice pass

Resubmission statement (end of page 8, just above Longform) (730 words / limit 1000)

This application resubmits a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant proposal that did not advance in a prior cycle. The revision is not a polish of the same packet. The concern underneath it is the one that began this doctorate: how Black communities preserve and reimagine fugitive histories beyond the archive. What changes is that it is now posed as an anthropological question about how Black communities make and keep memory at places where that memory has been erased, contested or rebuilt, with six months of fieldwork planned to answer it.

Three limitations in the earlier submission drive this rewrite.

First, the earlier main questions were methodological. They asked what digital tools and immersive media could do with Black history, rather than posing one empirical problem that interviews, observation and archives could answer. Several sub-questions (spatial, sonic, ethical, interactive) competed, so reviewers could not see the stakes.

Second, media outputs sat at the center of the purpose and methods sections. That framing made the proposal read as a media-production or dissertation-completion request, not as a request to collect new evidence in communities and archives during a defined window.

Third, the fieldwork plan was thin. It named sites without a comparative design, a residency schedule, or countable targets for interviews and archive days, and Plan B leaned on remote media production rather than on another route to the same evidence.

The revised project answers each problem.

One question, three sites. The research asks how Black communities create and maintain spaces of cultural memory and resistance at three places in the US South: Congo Square in New Orleans, where enslaved and free people of African descent gathered on Sundays to drum, dance and trade, and where practitioners still gather; McCorkle Place at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where the enslaved poet George Moses Horton sold verses to students, where a Confederate monument was later toppled and removed, and where a memorial to the enslaved and free Black people who built the university stands; and the Hotel Lincoln in the Eddie Robinson Sr. Historic District of South Baton Rouge, a Jim Crow-era Black hotel listed in the Green Book that a Black-owned firm is working to restore. These sites were part of the approved dissertation design from the start. What changes is how they are studied. Each represents a different mode of erasure (the suppression and folklorization of African performance, the monumental silencing of enslaved labor on a campus, and the disinvestment threatening Black commercial architecture), and each has living stewards who keep memory anyway. The comparison is the contribution.

Fieldwork, not platform. Plan A is a single-researcher itinerary from July through December 2027: a Louisiana block (New Orleans and Baton Rouge, about 80 miles apart, worked from a local base in Louisiana) from July through September, a Chapel Hill block in October and November while the campus is in session, and a short return to Louisiana in early December for follow-up and return of transcripts. Each block has countable targets: two core narrators per site (six in total), each recorded in about three in-depth life-history sessions (18 sessions), two listening sessions per site where partners agree, and targeted archive days at named repositories in each city.

Methods serve the question. Narrative, multimodal anthropology (recorded oral history, consented still and 360° documentation of public landscapes, and storytelling as a mode of analysis) is how the evidence is gathered and returned. It is not the question. No public platform, VR build or media product is budgeted or promised.

A Plan B that reaches the same evidence. If travel is blocked, Plan B keeps the same three sites and the same question through remote and hybrid oral histories organized with paid community liaisons, directed archive requests at the same repositories, and two terms of tuition while research proceeds remotely. Both plans total US$24,900.

Clearer boundary between preparation and funded work. Earlier pilot visits, a prior peer-reviewed publication and earlier graduate training appear in Q4 as readiness. They are not funded activities. The earlier proposal also stretched toward many additional sites; this version is sized for one researcher and one six-month window.

In short, the resubmission turns a methods-forward sketch into a question-first plan: three named sites of Black memory, one comparative question about memory under erasure, countable interviews and archive days, consent-and-return ethics, and a Plan B that fails closed on the same anthropological problem.

Q1 Purpose / main question (790 words / limit 1000)

Purpose

Since the onset of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, enslaved Africans have taken advantage of their new geographic orientation to transcend bondage. They traversed intricate socio-political circumstances and spatial geographies to land at various degrees of liberation that are currently poorly understood. Grounded in the notion of Black Fugitivity (Harney and Moten 2013) to acknowledge the fleeting nature of intangible expressions and oral histories (Takaragawa et al. 2019), the act of fugitivity is related to space and place making alongside and beyond traditional geographies within what Katherine McKittrick calls “terrains of struggle” (McKittrick 2006, 7) which work to preserve and reimagine narratives that counteract systematic erasure.

Architectural historian Rebecca Ginsburg (2007, 36) articulates that, “[i]n antebellum America, controlling the movement of enslaved people was an almost obsessive priority of planters and planters’ agents.” The restriction of Black mobility was a primary feature of enslavement, from the spatial order of the slave ships, plantations, and colonial landscapes to the legal codes that required passes, identification, and sundown laws. From the persistent rhythms of Congo Square in New Orleans, where African drumming traditions flourished despite similar restrictions, to the candlelit determination of George Moses Horton teaching himself to read in North Carolina, to the resilient Black community of the Eddie Robinson Historic District that defied spatial constraints, each site represents a distinct response to these oppressive laws. These spaces, separated by geography but united in purpose, demonstrate how African Americans transformed sites of restriction into enduring monuments of resistance pushing back against limited ideals of what is possible.

Congo Square, in what is now Louis Armstrong Park, was a Sunday gathering place where enslaved and free people of African descent drummed, danced and traded (Evans 2011). It was later renamed, enclosed in a park built over a demolished Black neighborhood, and folklorized as the “birthplace of jazz”; drummers and organizers still gather there and argue over what it means. McCorkle Place, the oldest quad at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is where Horton sold poems to students; it held a Confederate monument from 1913 until protesters toppled it in 2018, and a memorial to the enslaved and free Black people who built the university stands nearby. The Hotel Lincoln, in the Eddie Robinson Sr. Historic District of South Baton Rouge, was a Green Book hotel during Jim Crow and is now being restored by a Black-owned firm amid investment pressure. Each site shows a different mode of erasure: folklorization of African performance, monumental silencing of enslaved labor, and disinvestment of Black commercial architecture.

Main research question

How might we reimagine these narratives to remind, uplift, and validate Black experiences? For this fieldwork, that concern takes an ethnographic form: How do Black communities create and maintain spaces of cultural memory and resistance at sites of erasure, preserving fugitive histories beyond the archive, and how do those practices at Congo Square, McCorkle Place and the Hotel Lincoln differ according to the kind of erasure each site has undergone?

Sub-questions

1. Stewardship: Who keeps memory at each site, through what practices (performance, gathering, protest, tours, preservation work, storytelling), and what do stewards say they are protecting?

2. Erasure: How do archival, institutional and built-environment records at each site document, distort or omit Black presence, and how do stewards work with or against those records?

3. Narrative as evidence: What do consented oral histories and documentation of public landscapes make knowable about memory work that archives alone cannot?

Why this design

The object is anthropological: the social practice of keeping memory where it has been erased. The stories people tell about these places are data, and recorded storytelling is the method that collects them. New Orleans and Baton Rouge are about 80 miles apart and can be worked from a local base in Louisiana; Chapel Hill is a contained campus and town. The window from 1 July to 31 December 2027 is sized to match: two core narrators per site (six in total), each recorded in about three in-depth life-history sessions (18 sessions), two listening sessions per site where partners agree, and archive days near each site (about 10 in New Orleans, 8 in Baton Rouge and 12 in Chapel Hill). These are planning targets, not promises of saturation.

The ability to study these spaces of resistance today is only possible because of the tireless efforts of Black historians, community activists, and everyday people who existed in these spaces and fought for their official recognition. The places they protected, “rival geographies” of movement and refusal (Camp 2004), remain the most exposed to demolition, renaming and archival silence (Trouillot 1995). Documenting how communities hold them now, while those who remember are living and while each site is contested, is the purpose of this fieldwork.

Q2 Scholarship / inspiration (649 words / limit 1000)

My doctoral research contributes to the emerging domain of fugitive anthropology, which critiques the false notion of objectivity within the discipline and addresses the neutral stance position that replicates colonial and extractivist forms of knowledge production by erasing racialized, gendered, and classist elements in research (Berry et al. 2017). The Black fugitive in the United States is a figurative and literal construct, used to expose oppressive forms of state governance and the development of strategic plans to achieve freedom from the state (Sojoyner 2017). Often fixed within a historical environment, the Black fugitive in my research is situated within both the historical and contemporary settings. The focus on mobility shifts the conversation of fugitive spaces from static to a kinetic processes of flight and movement through colonial and native landscapes. The notion of rival geographies as adopted by historian Stephanie Camp (2004), helps to understand space in the context of slavery that puts forth alternative ways of knowing through the use of space that rejected the ideals and demands of authority.

Black geographies. McKittrick (2006) argues that Black geographies are often treated as absent even as Black people produce space under violence, and McKittrick (2011) develops a “Black sense of place” from the plantation to the present. McKittrick and Woods (2007) frame Black placemaking as political practice rather than residue. Ginsburg (2007) shows that enslaved people’s knowledge of the landscape was itself a resource for resistance and flight. Together these works give the project its starting point: erasure is spatial, and so is the work of keeping memory. The project asks whether and how rival geographies persist in present-day stewardship.

Archival silence. Trouillot (1995) shows that silences enter history at every stage, from the making of sources to the telling of narratives. Hartman (2008) asks how to write from archives that record Black lives mainly through violence, Hartman (1997) traces how subjection continued beyond emancipation, and Hartman (2019) models how to recover Black lives the record holds only in fragments. Municipal records about Congo Square, university records about McCorkle Place and property records in South Baton Rouge each document Black presence through institutions that sought to manage, display or remove it. The fieldwork reads those records alongside what stewards say.

The three sites. Evans (2011) reconstructs Congo Square as a Sunday gathering place and traces its renaming, its enclosure in a park built over a demolished Black neighborhood, and its role in diasporic performance today; its meaning is still argued over by those who drum and dance there. McCorkle Place sits within a national debate over Confederate monuments and campus histories of slavery, where the monument’s toppling and the university’s memorial to Black builders put institutional and community memory in contact. The Hotel Lincoln belongs to the infrastructure of Black travel documented in the Green Book; Sorin (2020) shows how Black travelers built a parallel geography of hotels and businesses under Jim Crow and how it declined after desegregation. The hotel’s restoration asks what preservation does to memory.

What the literature lacks is a comparison of how memory is maintained across different kinds of erasure. Studies of each site stay inside one frame: diasporic performance, campus monuments, or Black business history. Read together, the sites test whether stewardship practices converge or whether the mode of erasure shapes the mode of remembering.

Narrative, multimodal anthropology. Collins, Durington and Gill (2017) invite anthropologists to treat media practice as collaborative knowledge-making. Takaragawa et al. (2019) caution that nothing about multimodal approaches is inherently liberatory. With increased calls for multimodal anthropology, there is a greater need to better understand ethical issues surrounding these new technological approaches and their capacity to reproduce harmful power structures (Smith and Hennessy 2020). I approach the sites as a storyteller and anthropologist: oral histories, listening sessions and consented documentation of public landscapes are how I gather evidence about memory work, and the stories stewards tell are the data.

Q3A Plan A methodology (778 words / limit 1000)

Plan A overview

Plan A collects new evidence between 1 July and 31 December 2027 to answer Q1: how Black communities create, contest and maintain memory at sites of erasure, and how stewardship differs at Congo Square, McCorkle Place and the Hotel Lincoln according to the kind of erasure each site has undergone. I carry out all fieldwork myself, as one researcher, across two regional blocks.

Methods

1. Oral history. I will work closely with two core narrators per site, six in total, and record each of them in about three in-depth life-history sessions, for 18 sessions in all. At each site I will work with two narrators: one member of the descendant community and one steward of the site’s history, so that lived memory and keeping practice speak alongside each other. Narrators are drawn from stewards: drummers, dancers and cultural organizers at Congo Square; Black town residents, alumni, workers, student organizers and memorial advocates connected to McCorkle Place; and residents, preservation workers, business owners and former patrons connected to the Hotel Lincoln and the surrounding historic district. Interviews follow a narrative protocol: people are asked to tell the story of the place in their own terms, then asked about the practices through which they keep it. Recruitment begins through community organizations and stewards I already know at each site. Going deep with a few narrators lets me follow how one person keeps a place across a lifetime. The listening sessions and archive days below are the broader community layer.

2. Listening sessions. Two sessions per site (six total), where partners agree, in which participants hear and respond to excerpts from earlier interviews and archival findings. These sessions test my interpretations with the community and are the first stage of returning materials.

3. Participant observation. Attendance at public gatherings and events at each site, such as Sunday drumming at Congo Square, campus commemorations and tours at McCorkle Place, and preservation and community events in South Baton Rouge, recorded in fieldnotes.

4. Archive days. Targeted reading at repositories near each site to document how institutional records describe or omit Black presence. New Orleans (about 10 days): The Historic New Orleans Collection’s Williams Research Center; the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University; and the New Orleans Public Library’s Louisiana Division and City Archives, for records on the square, the park’s construction and the neighborhood it displaced. Baton Rouge (about 8 days): LSU Libraries Special Collections, the archives of Southern University’s John B. Cade Library and the East Baton Rouge Parish Library’s Baton Rouge Room, for records on the historic district, Black businesses and the hotel. Chapel Hill (about 12 days): UNC’s Wilson Library (Southern Historical Collection, North Carolina Collection and University Archives), for records on the monument, the memorial and enslaved and Black labor at the university. Digitized Green Book editions are read from the desk.

5. Documentation of public landscapes. Consented still photography and 360° imaging of public memorial and street landscapes, under each site’s rules. No aerial imaging is planned. Documentation is a record of the landscape as stewards describe it, coded alongside interviews; it is not a product.

Timeline

July–September 2027: Louisiana block (about 13 weeks), worked from a local base in Louisiana. July and August center on Congo Square, timed to summer gatherings; September centers on the Hotel Lincoln and South Baton Rouge. New Orleans and Baton Rouge are about 80 miles apart, so I can follow events at either site by car without relocating. Targets: four core narrators and about 12 life-history sessions, four listening sessions, about 18 archive days.

October–November 2027: Chapel Hill block (about 8.5 weeks), in a furnished short-term rental while the campus is in session, so students, staff and town residents are available. Targets: two core narrators and about six life-history sessions, two listening sessions, about 12 archive days, with occasional trips to Durham and Raleigh for interviews.

1–15 December 2027: Return to Louisiana for follow-up interviews and to return draft transcripts to participants for review.

16–31 December 2027: Transcription checking and a first coding pass from home. Codes follow the sub-questions: who stewards, through what practices, against which records, and what each mode of erasure (folklorization, monumental silencing, disinvestment) does to remembering. Analysis preparation only; no writing-up costs are requested.

Countable products: 18 transcribed life-history sessions with six narrators, with consent and return logs; six listening-session notes; annotated archive inventories for each city; fieldnotes and landscape documentation logs; coding memos comparing the three sites.

Ethics and access. The project has institutional research ethics approval for oral history and audiovisual fieldwork, valid through June 2027; it will be renewed before fieldwork starts. Archive user agreements and reproduction permissions will be in place by 30 June 2027.

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

Q3B Plan B methodology (636 words / limit 1000)

Plan B overview

Plan B answers the same question as Plan A: how Black communities create, contest and maintain memory at sites of erasure, and how stewardship differs at Congo Square, McCorkle Place and the Hotel Lincoln. It keeps the same three sites, the same evidence types and the same total (US$24,900). It replaces my travel with remote and hybrid methods. It does not substitute a podcast, VR build or other media production for fieldwork.

Trigger conditions

Plan B applies if travel to the sites is blocked or unsafe, for reasons such as health, a disaster affecting the Gulf Coast or North Carolina during hurricane season, or restrictions on in-person research. Because research would proceed remotely, Plan B also includes two terms of doctoral tuition, as the Foundation allows.

Evidence path (July–December 2027)

1. Remote and hybrid oral history. I record the same six core narrators, two per site, in about three life-history sessions each (18 sessions), by secure video or phone, matching Plan A’s targets. A paid community liaison at each site helps schedule sessions, sets up loaned recording kits for participants who want better audio or prefer to record in person with a trusted local, and helps older participants with technology. I conduct every interview myself. Consent, withdrawal and return-of-materials protocols match Plan A. The existing ethics approval will be amended to cover remote modes before 1 July 2027.

2. Remote listening sessions. Two sessions per site (six total) run online or hybrid, with the liaison hosting participants in a shared space if they prefer. Participants receive a stipend and a connectivity allowance so that remote participation costs them nothing.

3. Directed archive requests at the same repositories. I write all query lists from finding aids; paid research assistants in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Chapel Hill pull and scan named items, and I order reproductions directly where repositories offer them. Repositories match Plan A: The Historic New Orleans Collection, the Amistad Research Center and the New Orleans Public Library in New Orleans; LSU Libraries Special Collections, Southern University’s Cade Library archives and the East Baton Rouge Parish Library in Baton Rouge; and UNC’s Wilson Library in Chapel Hill. I do all reading, inventory and analysis. Digitized Green Book editions and newspaper databases remain available from the desk.

4. Landscape evidence. Without my travel, landscape evidence draws on photographs and recordings that stewards already hold and choose to share, images taken by participants or liaisons with consent, and openly licensed historical images. No line in Plan B buys an exhibit, VR build or other media product.

Partial variants

If only one region is blocked, I keep the other in person and run the blocked region remotely through the same liaison and research-assistant structure. Because I have a local base in Louisiana, the Louisiana sites are the most likely to stay in person. Any such shift would be requested from the Foundation as a reallocation within the same total.

Timeline (same window)

July–September: Launch archive requests in all three cities; recruit through liaisons; remote interviews and two listening sessions for Congo Square, then the Hotel Lincoln.

October–November: Remote interviews and listening sessions for McCorkle Place; receive and annotate archive scans.

December: Follow-up interviews; return draft transcripts to participants; transcription checking and first coding pass using the same codes as Plan A.

Countable products: 18 transcribed life-history sessions with six narrators, with consent and return logs; six listening-session notes; annotated archive inventories for each city; coding memos comparing the three sites. These match Plan A’s products.

What Plan B keeps and refuses

Keeps: the same question, sites, evidence types, products and total.

Refuses: switching to media production, adding new sites, or treating digitization as a public deliverable.

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

Q4 Why you (674 words / limit 1000)

I am prepared to carry out this project because of a long commitment to Black memory in the US South, tested field practice at these sites, and relationships that make entry possible within the July–December 2027 window.

Commitment. My interest in memory under erasure began with family history: learning of racial terror in my own Alabama lineage taught me how descendants hold memory when official records are late, partial or silent. Following fugitive anthropology’s point that “the field travels within our bodies” (Berry et al. 2017), I name that history as part of how I enter the field and how participants may read me. I am a Black researcher returning to places tied to my own history, and I am also an outsider in each specific community. Consent conversations will make both positions visible.

Prior evidence and training. Building on my master’s research, where I conducted an oral history of lynching in the American Deep South, including the self-discovery of a distant relative who was lynched in Alabama, I was trained in interviewing, archival checking and care with traumatic testimony. This work demonstrated how diverse scholarly forms are generative modes for anti-racist scholarship, and also raised new questions about the possibilities and limitations of new technologies for representing the histories of Black communities and settlements in North America. Prior Alabama fieldwork, extended from my master’s research and revisited during the PhD, was published in a peer-reviewed special issue on Black museums. That work showed me how heritage institutions and descendant communities negotiate what counts as memory, which is the central problem of this project. In 2022 I gave a public talk on the McCorkle Place memorial landscape with a scholar of the site’s history, which deepened my knowledge of its archives and its campus and town audiences. Pilot visits to all three sites in this proposal tested consented oral-history recording, still and 360° documentation of public landscapes and entry protocols. At the Hotel Lincoln, I spent a summer working with a Black-owned preservation team, documenting historic Black buildings in South Baton Rouge. These experiences are preparation. They are not funded activities in this grant.

Skills for Plan A. Doctoral training combines anthropological advising on race, place and heritage with training in multimodal methods: narrative oral history, audiovisual recording, still and spatial documentation, secure data handling, and transcription and coding. I work as a storyteller as well as an anthropologist, and that matters for this design: the method depends on asking people to tell the story of a place and listening for the practices inside that story. Archival training lets me read municipal, university and property records critically against community voice. I will use qualitative coding software for the comparative analysis.

Relationships and collaborators. At each site, entry proceeds through people and organizations I met during pilot visits. In New Orleans, these are drummers and cultural organizers who gather at Congo Square; in Chapel Hill, campus and town contacts connected to the memorial landscape and to Black neighborhood history; in South Baton Rouge, the preservation team and residents connected to the historic district. One paid community liaison per site will help schedule interviews and sessions. Collaborators are described generally in this double-anonymous answer; named contacts and letters can be provided to the Foundation if awarded.

Ethics and permissions. The project has institutional research ethics approval for oral history and audiovisual fieldwork, valid through June 2027, which will be renewed before fieldwork starts. Archive user agreements and reproduction permissions will be in place by 30 June 2027. No human remains research and no aerial imaging are planned.

Feasibility. The plan is sized for one researcher. Two of the three sites are an hour’s drive apart and can be worked from a local base in Louisiana, and the third is a single campus and town. Interview targets, session counts and archive days are specified for each block. Because pilot visits have already tested consent language, recording workflows and entry, what remains is new collection and a first comparative coding pass between 1 July and 31 December 2027.

Q5 Ethics (389 words / limit 500)

The most important ethical issues are consent and care with people who carry painful histories; power differences between institutions and community stewards; documentation at public memorial sites; and returning materials to the people who shared them.

Approval. The project has institutional research ethics approval for oral history and audiovisual fieldwork, valid through June 2027; it will be renewed before fieldwork starts. Plan B’s remote modes would be added by amendment before 1 July 2027 if needed.

Consent and care. With increased calls for multimodal anthropology, there is a greater need to better understand ethical issues surrounding these new technological approaches and their capacity to reproduce harmful power structures (Smith and Hennessy 2020). Following fugitive anthropology’s refusal of extractive research (Berry et al. 2017), recruitment runs through stewards and community organizations, not cold approaches. Consent is ongoing: participants may skip questions, pause recording, withdraw quotes or images, and choose whether to be named or anonymous. Interviews about demolition, racial terror and campus slavery can surface distress; I will share local support resources and let participants set the pace. Participants may also keep places, practices or stories out of the research entirely, and I treat that refusal as part of the evidence about how memory is protected, not as an obstacle. I will name my own position, including my family’s history in the South, so that participants can decide what to share.

Institutions and archives. University, municipal and property records often describe Black people through the eyes of those who managed or removed them. I will follow user agreements and reproduction rules, and I will read those records alongside stewards’ accounts rather than letting them overwrite community voice. At McCorkle Place, some participants may be university employees or students; interviews will not be shared with the university, and identifying details will be removed where participants request it.

Documentation. Still and 360° imaging covers public landscapes only, with permission from stewards and under site rules. I will not record private homes, ceremonies or individuals without explicit consent. No aerial imaging is planned.

Return and benefit. Draft transcripts return to participants for review, and agreed recordings, transcripts and images return to them and to partner organizations on terms they set. Participants receive honoraria, and community liaisons are paid. Data are stored encrypted with tiered access, and community-restricted materials stay out of open archives.

Q6 Contribution / audiences / why now (589 words / limit 750)

This project contributes to the anthropology of memory, place and race by comparing how Black communities maintain memory across three different kinds of erasure in the US South. It also extends narrative, multimodal anthropology into comparative fieldwork, where recorded stories and documented landscapes are evidence to be analyzed rather than products to be displayed.

Traditions entered. Black geographies has shown space to be both a technology of racialization and a ground for Black placemaking (McKittrick 2006, 2011; McKittrick and Woods 2007). Work on Black fugitivity treats flight and refusal as ongoing practices of making life (Harney and Moten 2013; Sojoyner 2017), and fugitive anthropology refuses extractive research (Berry et al. 2017). Historians of slavery have traced “rival geographies” that enslaved people made within constraint (Camp 2004). Work on archival silence shows how power shapes what can be known about the past (Trouillot 1995; Hartman 2008, 2019). Multimodal anthropology invites collaborative, public knowledge-making (Collins, Durington and Gill 2017) and attention to the material life of archives (Smith and Hennessy 2020). This project brings those traditions to three sites rarely studied together.

New insight. The three sites represent three distinct modes of erasure: the suppression and folklorization of African performance at Congo Square, the monumental silencing of enslaved labor at McCorkle Place, and the disinvestment of Black commercial architecture at the Hotel Lincoln. Studies of each tend to stay within one field: diasporic performance, campus monuments or preservation. By comparing them with the same methods in the same six months, the project can ask whether the kind of erasure a place has undergone shapes the kind of memory work its stewards do. Do performance communities keep memory through repetition and presence, campus communities through protest and counter-memorials, and preservation communities through ownership and restoration? Or do stewards across all three draw on shared practices of storytelling, gathering and refusal? Either answer would tell anthropologists something new about how memory survives erasure, grounded in what stewards say and do rather than in institutional narratives about them.

Audiences. Anthropologists of race, memory, heritage and the US South; scholars in Black studies and Black geographies; public historians and preservation practitioners who must decide whose stories a restored building or a revised campus landscape will tell; and the communities at each site, who receive their transcripts, recordings and the project’s findings on terms they set. Reciprocity with stewards is part of the method, not an add-on.

Why now. Each site is in active transition. At McCorkle Place, the university and the town are still working out what replaces a toppled monument. In South Baton Rouge, restoration of the Hotel Lincoln is under way amid new investment in the district, so its future meaning is being decided now. At Congo Square, practitioners continue to contest how the square is managed and represented. The people who remember these sites before their current transformations are aging. The stakes are concrete: enslaved Africans and their descendants reached uneven degrees of liberation, and the places they built are the ones most exposed to demolition, renaming and silence (Camp 2004; Trouillot 1995). A July–December 2027 fieldwork window lets the project record how memory is being kept while these decisions are still open.

The outcome of answering my research questions will contribute to uplifting Black heritage as educational sites, preserving intangible histories, and developing curriculum by co-designing projects intended for intergenerational communication. The claim is precise rather than sweeping: a comparative account, grounded in new oral history, observation and archival evidence, of how Black communities maintain memory at three sites of erasure.

Plan A budget (best case, in person): US$24,900

Plan B budget (remote): US$24,900

Also in final/WG-budget-PlanA-PlanB-DRAFT.xlsx. Bibliography: final/WG-bibliography.pdf (+ .docx/.md).