In 2020-2021, the Humanities Center funded three exciting collaborative public humanities projects. The first, “Growing Strong: Empowering Girls in the 21st Century through Stories of Classical Female Mythological Figures and Contemporary Women,” was a partnership between Girls Place and Anastasia Pantazopoulou (Ph.D. candidate, Classics) and Anthony Smith (Ph.D. student, Classics) to help young girls reflect on their identity by weaving together narratives of inspirational ancient Greco-Roman goddesses and contemporary women figures.
In the “E-Telling Project: Social Patchwork and 21st-Century Literacies,” Alejandro Acero and Darian Hector (graduate students, Spanish and Portuguese Studies) and Kamil Leavitt (Immigrant Family Liaison of Alachua County Schools) teamed up to connect local K-12 students with bilingual older storytellers to share intergenerational stories in Spanish. In the third project, “Caribbean Voices: Connecting People and Sharing Stories,” John Nemmers (George A. Smathers Libraries, Curator of Architecture Archives and the Panama Canal Museum Collection) worked with Carmen Grimes-Eccles (Pan Caribbean Sankofa, Inc.) to uncover the contributions (although erased) of tens of thousands of West Indian laborers who built the Panama Canal.
“For us, collaboration is a key element of the humanities. Collaboration allows us to share our knowledge, broaden our understanding of different fields, create spaces for social change and grow both as individuals and communities. As part of our collaboration with Girls Place, we had the opportunity to engage with sixth-to-eighth-grade girls of the broader Gainesville community and created an environment where they could consider their role as empowered young women in their personal lives and communities. This mutual process of growth prompted us to find ways to make our research accessible to diverse audiences and re-examine our roles in the structures and improvement of our non-academic and academic communities.” – Anastasia Pantazopoulou, Ph.D. candidate, Classics and Anthony Smith, Ph.D. student, Classics
“Our public humanities project helped me see my resilience when faced with pressure and the importance of community learning amid unprecedented challenges. Alejandro Acero and I designed the E-Telling Project, which had bilingual (Spanish- English) adults speak with fifth-grade students from Gainesville Country Day School (GCDS) via Zoom. These volunteers shared stories with students about their childhoods and explained how meaningful it is to be bilingual and bicultural in Florida. Students, in turn, created digital stories based on the stories shared by these volunteers.” – Darian Hector, graduate student, Spanish and Portuguese Studies