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.
