Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

On November 13 at 7 p.m., MusicGNV, Pulp Arts, and UF’s Center for Arts, Migration and Entrepreneurship will host an evening of music and conversation with No-No Boy at Heartwood Soundstage. No-No Boy is the musical project of Dr. Julian Saporiti, a historian and musician whose work combines songwriting and storytelling to bring attention to lesser-known chapters of American history. Drawing on historical research and personal narratives, his performances offer audiences a unique lens on past events and the people who lived through them. His albums have been released by Smithsonian Folkways and received coverage from outlets like NPR Music and Pitchfork. The Gainesville program will include a live performance and community discussion, along with an educational visit to a University of Florida classroom. The event is free and open to the public.

Master Farmer Otis Garrison’s workshop series, “Urban Farming: Cultivating Cultural Roots,” blends hands-on urban agriculture training with discussions about local heritage and traditions. With support from community partners including SLIICK Garden, UF’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, and the Agricultural Education and Communication department, the initiative aims to highlight the role of farming in shaping neighborhood identity in Gainesville’s Porters Quarters. Over 12 weeks, participants will learn traditional gardening practices, attend cooking demonstrations, and engage in storytelling sessions that document personal and community histories. These sessions will also be preserved in a digital archive. The program fosters community connection while promoting sustainable living, and includes contributions from UF students and faculty for research and service-learning opportunities. Educational signage around the garden and recorded interviews will further connect residents to the history of their neighborhood, bridging generational knowledge and practical skills in a meaningful way.

This project builds on work that began in 2019, when Bailey Learning and Arts Collective, the UF Levin School of Law, and other community partners offered workshops with a public health intervention model in two traditional neighborhoods to inform residents about heirs property. Facilitated by longtime Pleasant Street resident Terri Bailey, the workshop included storytelling, printed information, and talks by UF faculty and heirs property lawyers, providing interested property owners with local legal aid service. This grant will expand the workshops to other neighborhoods and enable the inclusion of more cultural arts content.

As the complexities of lived experiences impact physical and mental health outcomes, storytelling is a tool we can use to build empathy, understanding and resilience. “Recovery in Community” centers the voices and experiences of historically marginalized communities, artists and creatives, and students in a way that speaks to the universality of the human experience. This project will deliver a moving theatrical production by Art Prevails Project; workshops in storytelling, poetry, and spoken word; and engaging panels and talkback conversations which will be open to campus and the community at large. Through engaging with the arts, humanities and other resources, participants will get to explore ways to address some of the most elevated concerns exacerbated in the age of COVID-19: namely social isolation, collective trauma, and mental health. How can we see ourselves through stories that highlight identity, resilience, recovery, and ultimately community? View Past Recipients

The George A. Smathers Libraries and Pan Caribbean Sankofa will hold a public humanities program in Panama in August 2023 to examine the history and lives of the Caribbean people who lived and worked in the former Panama Canal Zone and in Panama. The program, which includes a panel discussion and traveling exhibit, will address the importance of identity, community, and culture as part of the Caribbean diaspora. In addition to raising awareness about the experiences of these Caribbean people, the program will foster dialogue and provide a forum for Caribbean people to share their voices and perspectives.

This project develops the oral history component of a new collaborative digital history project at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program titled White Anti-Racist Activism in the Gulf South (WARA), in partnership with the Alachua County Labor Coalition and The All Y’all Social Justice Collective. WARA focuses on White anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-classist activism since 1980. This project concentrates on the oral history component of WARA to document the experiences of White social justice activists through their testimony and artifacts. Using that data, WARA researchers will present significant findings to the public in written vignettes and a series of five videos on a new website established for WARA.

This project will create a documentary about the members and descendants of Rutledge, a community of formerly enslaved African Americans that was formed in Alachua county after Reconstruction, and how the decrease in Black-owned land in that area has impacted culture and contributed to the growth of northwest Gainesville from 1900 to today.

Belay Alem and Carol Richardson collaborate on this project representing their respective institutions, UF and the A. Quinn Jones Museum respectively. Their goal is to bring the African American Community to the discussion board to discuss stories about heirs’ properties. The project partners believe that heirs’ property is a topic worth discussion. People have a lot of emotions, memories, and histories attached to their built environment. This being the fact, the history of African Americans as it relates to build environment is less documented. The grant will help to launch this initiative.

In Southwest Florida, the agricultural community of Immokalee has increasingly become a popular destination for immigration and public health scholars, nonprofits, and community organizers. Although Haitian Creole (HC) is the second most represented language in households that do not speak English (Immokalee Census Data, 2020), public and academic literature on Immokalee’s immigrant population rarely include Haitians within their assessments while local community organizations often struggle to provide translation/interpretation, commonly relying on a single bilingual worker to support the entire organization. This project seeks to evaluate, provide resources for, and promote further Haitian Creole language accessibility (LA) in Immokalee, Florida.

The project will recover photos in the United States and take them to El Troje to contribute to historical memory which connects these two countries. The goal is to give back dignity to indigenous people in Troje , prepare a photo exhibition, and give them to the community. Troje, in Ecuador, is an indigenous community of native Quechua-speakers where Protestantism began an enormous awakening in 1954, even though the presence of religious missions from the United States started in 1902. Since the 1950s, religious missions and Peace Corps Volunteers took hundreds of pictures about indigenous that have not been exhibited and which have been stored in personal and institutional archives.

The workshop series consists of in-person and online arts-integrated workshops to help build lesson plans for K-12 curriculum with Alachua county teachers and advocates. It attends to the dire need for teachers to fulfill the Florida State Mandate to teach about the Ocoee Massacre and African American history. The materials co-created in the workshops will be available online for public accessibility on the websites of these organizations, and will be permanently housed in Samuel Proctor Oral History Program’s Joel Buchanan African American Studies Archive at the University of Florida.

The project highlights the language diversity present in this region, while also providing critical resources for organizations and agencies that support people who speak languages other than English. There is great need for language access services in this region, particularly for immigrant populations from racialized backgrounds. This handbook will include a website, print materials, a project launch event, and a touring exhibition that will travel throughout North Central Florida to showcase and share resources.

In an effort to integrate transient UF students to the local community and local Gainesville community members to the University of Florida, the Hispanic Student Association, Office of Hispanic-Latinx Affairs, and the Gainesville Latina Women’s League are collaborating to support the continual learning of local underrepresented community members. This collaboration supports free English language and citizenship preparation classes for the Gainesville community. By providing the resources to encourage comfortability and strength in the international community of Gainesville, the project provides the environment needed for each of these folks to grow and prosper in safety and solidarity.

The interactive exhibition “Port St. Joe: Finding Resilience on the Forgotten Coast” will be hosted at the Joe Center for the Arts in Port St. Joe, FL. The exhibition will disseminate and actively build upon the results of a 2-year UF/community partnership across the city of Port St. Joe. It is organized by the UF Florida Resilient Cities program (FRC) in collaboration with The Joe Center for the Arts, the City of Port St. Joe, and community partners. This exhibition will celebrate the history of the communities’ recovery from Hurricane Mathew, assess progress on resilience to date, and re-connect (post COVID-19) with the community to reflect on the challenges that climate change poses to the cultural and societal growth of Port St. Joe.

The George A. Smathers Libraries in partnership with Pan Caribbean Sankofa, Inc., propose two public humanities programs, to be held in UF and Panama in April 2021, to examine the history and lives of the Caribbean people who lived and worked in the former Panama Canal Zone and in Panama. In 1999 longtime Canal employee Cecil Haynes described the tens of thousands of West Indian laborers who constructed the Canal as VIPs, or Very Invisible People, because their stories were largely unknown and their contributions were unrecognized. Proposed programs will address the importance of identity, community, religion, language, and culture in the face of the Caribbean diaspora and the segregation and racism faced in Panama and the U.S. In addition to raising awareness about the lives and roles of these Caribbean people, the programs are intended to foster dialogue between the academic community and the dispersed Caribbean communities. These public engagement opportunities will provide forums for Caribbean people to share their voices, perspectives, and experiences as a marginalized community and also as people of great intelligence, expertise, professionalism, good character, and high morale in spite of discrimination and racism.

Young learners´ development of 21st-century literacies can respond to an urgent social concern: the disintegration of the sociocultural fabric due to the exclusion of the elderly. Culture is a continuum that changes over time and space. Therefore, the temporal distance between generations implies a cultural gap. Engaging with complex and multicultural identities coming from different generations allows learners to serve as mediators among generations and cultures. Bringing speakers from different generations together as members of one shared community revitalizes the social fabric while enhancing students’ intercultural and intergenerational competences. This pedagogical project uniquely plugs students into dynamic learning experiences involving elder raconteurs that help present the language through culturally authentic materials such as their testimonies, which serve as a reference for the development of multimodal texts produced with the aid of technology tools. Findings reveal that this intergenerational communication is pivotal to emboldening students to take ownership of their development of cross-cultural skills.

“Growing Strong: Empowering Girls in the 21st Century through Stories of Classical Female Mythological Figures and Contemporary Women” is addressing a major social challenge of our times, namely female empowerment. The UF and the Community partner seek to create an interactive, thought-provoking space for young girls to reflect on their identity as active community members and the multiple roles they can assume by discussing the stories of inspirational ancient Greco-Roman goddesses/figures alongside contemporary women. At a time when gender equality has not yet been realized, empowering girls to reach their full potential emerges as a crucial need. To actively contribute towards this goal, this program will open a dialogue between the UF Classics Department, which explores the language, literature, and culture of Ancient Mediterranean societies, and Gainesville’s middle-school community by engaging with the diverse participants at Girls Place. Our goal is to inspire girls of all backgrounds, ethnicities, and social status to become brave leaders and independent women. The project fosters an environment where the girls have the chance to connect with narratives about women’s identities and to consider their own roles in society.

In partnership with the Alachua County African American History Task Force, the UF Smathers Libraries held a two-day workshop with Black Studies scholars, heritage professionals, and culture keepers to promote and support Black-centered digital projects in North Central Florida.

This partnership between the UF College of Education’s Bilingual Education Program, the George A. Smathers Libraries, staff members at Coral Way Elementary School, and The American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora presented two programs to share the story of the first public bilingual school in the country: Coral Way Elementary School in Miami, Florida founded in 1963.

The Gainesville Under Ground Theatre Festival was an exploration of identity, history, philosophy, and language via a plethora of live mediums such as dance, theatre, music, installations, film screenings, literary readings, panel discussions and workshops.

This intercultural encounter used the work of internationally recognized Congolese comic artist Papa Mfumu’eto, West African comic artist and painter Didier Viodé, and Congolese novelist Fiston Mwanza as the basis for comic art workshops with Eastside High School history students, the results of which were exhibited at Gainesville’s Sequential Artists Workshop.

Refugees in Film – a four part film series showcased in the Hippodrome Theatre – examined the historical, representational, and political issues swirling around the current European refugee crisis.

River of Life, River of Dreams – a public exhibit and speaker series hosted by the Matheson History Museum – explored the complex relationships between the St. Johns River and those who depend on it.

Using the metaphor of the seed as an agent of exchange and expression of community culture and place, the Seed Cabinet – an interactive exhibit combining history, photographs, video, and physical seeds – inspired personal connections to local agriculture through displays and presentations across the north central Florida region.

In partnership with the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, oral histories and archival documents associated the Seahorse Key Marine Lab were conducted, preserved, and shared at public open houses at Seahorse Key.

In partnership with the Hippodrome Theatre and the Gainesville Parks, Recreation, and Culture Department, twenty-five students from underserved areas of Gainesville participated in a two-week theatre intensive (June 25th – August 8th) focused on conflict resolution and based on Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.

This collaboration created a public exhibit at the Cone Park Library to celebrate and inform the Gainesville community about the history and cultural importance of the Juneteenth/Emancipation Day holiday.

In partnership with the Gainesville Department of Parks and Recreation, this three-day workshop trained five teachers from the Gainesville and University of Florida communities in cultural competencies for teaching creative writing to teens in marginalized and underserved communities.

In partnership with the UF Department of History, Yopp! Inc. and the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program hosted a ten-month storytelling series at the Union Academy/Rosa B. Williams Recreation Center.

In partnership with the UF School of Architecture, Gainesville Modern produced a film series that both celebrates Gainesville’s cultural legacy of Modernist architecture and reflects how more modernist, sustainable urban design will benefit Gainesville in the future.

The University of Florida Smathers Libraries, Alachua County School District, and playwright/director Deborah Dickey collaborated to write and produce an original play that explores the lives of women in the Panama Canal Zone during its construction based on oral histories and archival materials from inhabitants of the Canal Zone.

This partnership created a major new exhibition of the centuries-old Hispanic tradition of carving “Santos” of the Virgin Mary by contemporary artist Xavier Colón; .THE HEART OF A CULTURE-The Santos of Xavier Colón Marrero was displayed in the historic Thomas Center gallery Sept. 27, 2014 – Jan. 3, 2015.