Humanities Truck Community Archive

Collection Title: Humanities Truck Community Archive
Description: The Humanities Truck is a fully customized delivery truck that serves as an experimental mobile platform for collecting, exhibiting, preserving, and expanding dialogue around the humanities. Using the truck, we seek to mobilize the humanities and democratize the sharing and production of knowledge by bringing together scholars at American University with community residents across Washington, D.C. Together we can collect, create, interpret, and curate stories that can return to the communities they originated from and circulate throughout the metropolitan region. The truck’s custom-design creates a unique space for facilitating participatory, cultural, and educational experiences in the humanities. It has the capacity to function as a recording studio, workshop and maker space, and exhibit and performance venue. People can engage with the truck’s interior and exterior spaces. The exterior features powerful speakers, an all-weather flat screen television, and brackets for attaching a 120” roll-down movie screen for film showings. The magnetized exterior wall of the truck can serve as an exhibition space or also be used to facilitate workshops. The interior of the truck is sound-insulated, equipped with air-conditioning, a second flat screen tv, and ceiling speakers. It is modular and flexible as tables and shelving can be easily added and moved. The space can function as a recording studio for doing oral histories, a digitization station, a workshop space, or a pop-up exhibit gallery. The Humanities Truck is made possible through funding from the Henry Luce Foundation along with additional support from American University. How do we mobilize the humanities? The Humanities Truck working group seeks to establish an experimental mobile platform for collecting and preserving materials, and inspiring dialog around the humanities. The truck will provide resources and equipment for projects that document experiences, start conversations, and share the stories of diverse and underserved communities in the Washington, DC Metropolitan region. It will function as a mobile workshop, recording studio, and exhibit space that can be driven across the region to work with specific micro-communities across the city in the spaces they already gather.
Downtown Displaced
The Downtown Displaced project involved an extensive collaboration between the Humanities Truck, Dan Kerr and students from his Engaged Community History course, and the Street Sense Media Filmmakers Cooperative. Collection contains photos from planning and creation of Downtown Displaced: A Case Study of Gentrification in Mount Vernon Square, 1840-Present exhibit, for which Dan Kerr's Engaged Community History class collaborated with Street Sense Media artists during the Spring 2019 academic semester. The exhibit explores the social costs of neighborhood change in a long temporal context. Collection also contains photos from May 20, 2019, when the exhibit was presented to the Street Sense Media collaborators. In June, the filmmakers co-op did a performance at the Carnegie Library, which drew upon this research.
Taking the Truck OUT!: Activism around the DC AIDS/HIV Crisis
This collection contains material from AU Public History student Hannah Byrne's exhibit on the history of Whitman Walker's Walk and 5K to End HIV, which faculty Truck Fellow Mary Ellen Curtin adapted for her Truck project about HIV/AIDS activism in DC. Hannah Byrne and Mary Ellen Curtin both presented exhibits at the Whitman Walker Walk and 5K to End HIV, and AU students Kai Walther and Audrey Barnett each completed oral histories for the project.