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  • Aquatic Spaces: Black to the Water

    work
    Creator:
    Porter, David
    Description:
    Launched in response to the growing crisis of narrative infrastructure, the Detroit River Story Lab is a collaborative, public-facing initiative that leverages the sociocultural, economic, and ecological centrality of the Detroit River corridor to reimagine it as an urban case study in narrative placemaking and civic renewal. Beginning with the premise that place-based storymaking is vital to sustaining democratic values and community capacity for self-determination, the Lab partners on projects designed to support the narrative capacities of local urban communities through the story-telling channels of community journalism, place-based education, and public history., There are many stories from across a variety of periods and contexts that foreground the prevalence of aquatic racialization in our region. These include the legal restrictions placed on Black residents’ access to the Detroit River in the aftermath of the successful escape of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn from Kentucky slave catchers in 1833, repeated episodes of the often violent expulsion of Black workers and residents from Wyandotte and other sundown towns along the Detroit River between the 1870s and 1940s – and the repeated erasure of these stories from official published histories of these towns, the Bob-Lo Excursion Company’s policy, in the 1930’s and 40’s, of barring Blacks from the ferry boats that provided access for Detroiters to the Boblo Island amusement park, a policy famously up-ended by the US Supreme Court in 1948 after being challenged by a 24-year-old Detroit, Sarah Elizabeth Ray, after being ordered to leave the boat, the demolition of the predominantly Black, riverside neighborhood of Black Bottom in Detroit in the 1950s in the name of urban renewal, the UN’s 2014 appeal, on the grounds of basic human rights, for the city of Detroit to restore access to water sourced from their own Detroit River to residents who can’t afford monthly water bills, and consumption restrictions on Detroit River fish important to local populations owing to long histories of environmental degradation., and Considered together, these cases would seem to point to an undertheorized dimension of racialized systems of hierarchy and exclusion in the Great Lakes region and possibly the US more generally. The origins and long-term effects of zones of racial exclusion in the economically decisive domains of work, education, and housing are by now well known. The role of waterways as similarly delineated spaces of privilege and oppression is less commonly noted; in a state whose history has been so thoroughly defined by its lakes and rivers and so regularly scarred by racial conflict, the phenomenon of aquatic racialization calls out for integrative examination and public reckoning. More information about Aquatic Spaces can be found at  https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/detroit-river-story-lab/.
    Discipline:
    Humanities and Social Sciences

  • Detroit River Story Lab: Sailing the River, Writing Ourselves

    work
    Creator:
    Porter, David
    Description:
    Launched in response to the growing crisis of narrative infrastructure, the Detroit River Story Lab is a collaborative, public-facing initiative that leverages the sociocultural, economic, and ecological centrality of the Detroit River corridor to reimagine it as an urban case study in narrative placemaking and civic renewal. Beginning with the premise that place-based storymaking is vital to sustaining democratic values and community capacity for self-determination, the Lab partners on projects designed to support the narrative capacities of local urban communities through the story-telling channels of community journalism, place-based education, and public history., The Story Lab co-designs scalable interventions to strengthen community-based forms of narrative infrastructure. Participants draw upon archives and oral histories to document previously marginalized narratives centering the river. Drawing on this research, we prototype new approaches to place-based learning, within the university and beyond, to expand the publics involved in the production and circulation of local narratives of identity and urban memory., and More information about the Detroit River Story Lab (DRSL) can be found at  https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/detroit-river-story-lab/.
    Discipline:
    Humanities and Social Sciences