Black Lives Next Door

The Center for Mason Legacies reimagines how to critically study the past and its afterlives of slavery and colonization. In the classroom and in the archives, we consider the myriad ways systems of oppression intersect rendering the lives of those we study simultaneously precarious and invisible. Student researchers are empowered to incorporate a range of interdisciplinary tools of investigation to deepen historical storytelling and one essential question frames each stage of student discovery: How do our inquiries critically care for Black life? Four antiracist methodologies—geospatial visual technology, Black digital humanities, critical library studies, and Black feminist praxis—informed the outcomes. Our pedagogical approach benefits from Black digital humanities and Black feminist ethics of care.

The multivalent methodology we deploy rests on four principles. First, we believe that justice-centered teaching and learning is a dynamic process with no predetermined endpoint. Second, there is a serious need for an interpersonal approach that encourages researchers, educators, and socially conscious activists to sustain a deeper conversation with one another. Third, the opportunities we intend to provide will equip students with skills enabling them to identify how racial inequity jeopardizes marginalized people enduring de jure and de facto discrimination. Finally, our methodology reconceives the idea of redress and repair as an outcome of historical inquiry that reconstructs suppressed pasts. In promoting these four principles, we urge our students to challenge master narratives, interrogate the veracity of the archives, and map geographies of accommodation and resistance. The Center for Mason Legacies advocates for local learning opportunities that widen avenues of interdisciplinary innovation and justice-centered teaching.