| Affiliations: | Aggie Research Mentoring Program |
| Project Leader: | Jennifer Blanks jenb2355@tamu.edu Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning |
| Faculty Mentor: | Cecilia Giusti, Ph.D. |
| Meeting Times: | Wednesdays 3:30 |
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Team Size:
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3 |
| Open Spots: | 2 |
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Special Opportunities:
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The student who help organize and analyze the images we are organizing will be invited to co-author a paper with me. However, the student must commit to doing both and providing volunteer time until the data is completely cleaned. The student may also have the opportunity to attend a conference with me, should funding be available.
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Team Needs:
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Masters student or upper-level undergraduate, willingness to learn Tropy photo organizing software, self-motivated, interested in cemetery preservation, able to commit 3hr-5hrs week. |
| Description | Today, news headlines in the United States read “Unknown Black cemetery found underneath an apartment complex,” “Local Black cemetery is suffering from years of neglect,” or something similar. In addition to land-use planning decisions, burial grounds suffer from environmental disasters like hurricanes and nuisance flooding. For African Americans, cultural resources are historically significant and central to their identity, and resiliency plays an essential role in helping historic Black settlements and communities maintain space- with cemeteries often being the only remaining evidence the community existed. Preservation planning practices and policies contribute to the exposure to risks, restrictions, and ultimately the erasure of these landscapes. Cemeteries are non-renewable resources, and disaster and preservation planners share the common goal of protecting their existence. Hazard preservation planning for cemeteries varies depending on the government levels, ownership, industry, and more with their approaches to identifying threats that put burial grounds at risk. This study is two-fold and seeks to learn best practices for documenting risks, threats, and assets found in Black cemeteries using local-knowledge. This study applies a geo-ethonographic approach to answer the question, how do Black cemeteries shape the Black experience in the presence of environmental and man-made threats? |