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.

: Cruising DC Oral History Project; A collection of interviews that explore the history of cruising in DC, created by Kai Walther

: DC History Conference 2022; The DC History Conference is an interdisciplinary, community conference considering the past, present, and future of the District. After two years without a conference in 2020 and 2021, the event returned in 2022, this time with free admission. The conference took place March 31-April 2, 2022. The Humanities Truck set up outside of the conference venue at the MLK Jr Memorial Library on April 1 and presented the exhibit "Downtown Displaced: A Case Study of Gentrification in Mount Vernon Square 1840-Present." The exhibit emerged from a four month collaboration with Street Sense artists, and it explores the social costs of neighborhood change in a long temporal context. In addition to the exhibit, the truck team hosted a mapping activity and conducted oral history interviews about people's experiences in the changing downtown area of Washington, DC. This collection contains photos from the event.

: Pride 2022; On June 12, 2022, the Humanities Truck team set up the truck at the corner of 6th and D streets, NW, a few blocks away from the Capital Pride festival. The team pre-made some pride-themed buttons while also inviting participants to create their own. There were three posters set up on the outside of the truck labeled Pride of the Past, Pride of the Present, and Pride of the Future. Event attendees were able to get their portrait taken and then add it to their poster of choice on the truck. Collection contains photos and other documentation of the event.