Preserving Our Past As Place-Based Care Work

There are few repositories and archives that hold extensive collections of oral histories pertaining to people of color, let alone community stories that help tell more comprehensive stories, which speak to changes in the built environment or serve to reinforce cultural identity and collective memory. While some cultural institutions have made a concerted effort to develop collections that include histories of people of color, there remains a pressing need to strengthen archival collections by recording and preserving place-based, hyper-local, non-dominant oral narratives that can create a blueprint for understanding our shared history. This is especially true for those who work in small and mid-sized cultural institutions

This webinar offers insights from preservation professionals on the type of care work it takes to preserve our past using similar techniques as archivists.  By the end of the program attendees will learn techniques including: 

• How to build long-term relationships with residents and community partners to help redress urban inequities 
• A more holistic management approach to combat the misrepresentation of publics that have been historically excluded from traditional archival practice

Speakers

Rita Cofield, Associate Project Specialist, Getty Conservation Institute

Rita Cofield received her BA in Architecture and Planning from Howard University. She is a cultural resource manager and public historian and has also stage managed theatrical productions throughout the United States. After receiving an advanced degree in Heritage Conservation from the University of Southern California, she began work at the Getty Conservation Institute to lead the African American Historic Places, Los Angeles project. She has valuable experience in community-based projects and is always finding ways to re-insert multiple perspectives into the larger narratives of our collective history. She enjoys empowering communities and working on activities that foster innovation when it comes to caring for historic resources in under-resourced neighborhoods. This is why she volunteers as the inaugural executive director for the Los Angeles-based advocacy organization, Friends At Mafundi in Watts, Ca. among her other volunteer memberships. 

Deqah Hussein-Wetzel, Historic Preservationist, Co-host/Producer, Urban Roots

Deqah Hussein-Wetzel is a Doctoral Student in Historic Preservation at Columbia GSAPP, whose work centers on the use of digital media and its role in preserving cultural memory in urban environments. The mission of this work is twofold: to amplify Black American stories that are in danger of being lost to posterity and to raise awareness about preservation-based development in the U.S. by utilizing oral histories and storytelling as a means to counter the forces of displacement and as inspiration for new forms of inclusive development. 

Deqah is also the founder of Urbanist Media, a nonprofit that preserves place through storytelling to promote equity in the built environment, and the co-host and producer of its flagship podcast, Urban Roots — a narrative, documentary-style audio project that utilizes oral histories to explore how Black cultural landscapes have evolved over time.

Deqah has a Bachelor of Urban Planning from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning and a Master of Historic Preservation with a Certificate in Nonprofit Management from the University of Oregon.