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.
Adams Morgan Day 2020
How could a truck spur digital experiences, especially during a pandemic? Humanities Truck project fellow Benjamin Stokes explored this concept during Adams Morgan Day on September 18, 2020. Adams Morgan Day is the longest-running neighborhood festival in DC. Stokes noted that things would be different, both for the pandemic and the immediacy of the protests around the murder of George Floyd. Stokes and project partners chose a hybrid approach that combined physical media (prints, signs, fliers, and video) with three kinds of digital interactivity: (1) mural hunt game; (2) trivia map activity; and (3) audio tour. The “Mural, Mural, on the Wall” game was a scavenger hunt-style game that guides players physically around the neighborhood, showcasing the murals and protest art along their path. Participating in the game automatically enrolled players in a raffle where the winner won a shirt designed by a local artist. (The prior year we had tested the raffle as a driver of activity, but this year it would be secondary.) Collection contains photos from the event.
Penn Ave East Neighborhood Plan
More than $450,000 in funds were recently allocated to Penn Ave SE to revise the Neighborhood Small Area Plan, and for a Main Street Program. Ben Stokes and other project partners travelled around the Penn Ave SE neighborhood, interviewing residents for stories and feedback about their neighborhood with the goal of the neighborhood being provided more funding and infrastructural support from the city. Collection contains photos and videos from the Ice Cream Listening tour along Penn Ave East Corridor on July 16, 2021, as well as from the Hard Choices game at Art all Night on October 5, 2021.