Letícia Ferreira, EODIAH Fellow, ATEC PhD candidate, UT Dallas

This talk explores two public interactive experiences on display at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, in Atlanta, Georgia: Lunch Counter Experience and Who Like Me, discussing how the setting of the Center as an institution contributes to the experience of its public interactives, as well as how each piece stages experiences of empathy through different media and modes of engagement, creating different subject positions for participants.

Whitney Stewart, Assistant Professor in Arts and Humanities, Department of History, UT Dallas

For centuries, slave cabins have disappeared from the US southern landscape due to environmental catastrophes, development, and lack of care or interest by white property owners. But there is another reason for the lack of nineteenth-century Black dwellings: the desire of Jim-Crow era Black activists to get rid of them. Stewart discusses her forthcoming essay that complicates the narrative of historic preservation by centering the non-preservation goals of Black activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It charts the quest of Black women and men in their “vigorous crusade” to eliminate one of the architectural remnants of slavery: the one-room cabin.