Check out the latest from the Tulane Mellon Program with our new Blog, covering updates on all our goings on and monthly Fellow Spotlights!
(Please note that this blog has not been updated since September 2022, but we have left the historical information up for anyone interested.)
Hello and Welcome to the very first edition of the Tulane Mellon Graduate Program Blog! We are excited to use this space to cover the goings-on of our program, to highlight the impressive works and accomplishments of our fellows, and to feature the voices and works of members of our program and our community. If you are interested in participating or have ideas and/or suggestions for the Tulane Mellon Graduate Program Blog please contact Graduate Assistant Zoe Sullivan at zsullivan@tulane.edu.
For our first blog post, we want to highlight an important and insightful event that took place this spring. On April 9, we were thrilled to present “A Social Innovation Conversation featuring Tulane University Mellon Scholars” graciously hosted by the Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking. This panel discussion was an amazing opportunity to show our community and those interested in the Tulane Mellon Graduate Program exactly what community-engaged is all about!
The discussion was led by Dr. Jen Lilly, an assistant professor at Fordham University in the Graduate School of Social Service and Tulane Mellon Fellow Alumnus. Dr. Lilly and three of her fellow Tulane Mellon Fellow alumni, Theo Hilton, Caleb Smith and Megan Flattley, shared their personal experiences and presented a critical reflection on both their doctoral work and their Tulane Mellon community-engaged projects. Participants discussed their own work with the Tulane Mellon program and helped to shed light on how the Mellon program supports fellows in using community engagement practices to redefine traditional definitions of academic scholarship and knowledge production within the humanities and beyond.
Dr. Lilly, who was a Ph.D. student in the City, Culture and Community program at Tulane, discussed how her work as a Tulane Mellon Fellow in conjunction with work with Dr. Laura Murphy and the Taylor Center, led her to create a project focused on using innovative design thinking to enable Latino youth organizers to use digital media to document their stories and share them with the world. Dr. Lilly discussed working with her community partner Puentes New Orleans and the young people she was working with, using a community centred approach and innovative social design thinking to co-create this project. This evolved into the participants filming, recording and editing themselves and each other, allowing these young people to tell their own stories in the “vein of the testimonial kind of storytelling traditions in Latin America that are centred around social justice.” Dr. Lilly went on to discuss how her Mellon project was instrumental in shaping her dissertation and helping her form an academic viewpoint focused on community-engaged scholarship.
Next, we heard from Theo Hilton, who worked with the Jane Place Sustainability Initiative as a Mellon fellow while pursuing his PhD in anthropology at Tulane. Theo stressed the importance of his partnership with Jane Place, an organization founded by Shana Griffin as a way to think about providing de-commodified permanently affordable housing in New Orleans. He also expressed how his viewpoint about his project changed throughout the course of his work. Theo spoke about how shifting his focus from a public-facing database to help low-income residents navigate the ‘sunset clause’ loophole found in many local low-income housing units to the creation of the database as a more private tool to help community organizers work for low-income housing tenants without the fear of the tool being used by developers caused him to rethink the importance of his Mellon project. He explained how by actualising his project in the real world he had to consider how to ensure that his project was actually beneficial to grassroots organizations and not counterproductive.
Caleb Smith, PhD candidate in history, then took the floor to share his story as a Mellon fellow alumnus. Caleb partnered with the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, which works to celebrate and explore the “people, places and philosophies of the African diaspora.” Caleb’s project and scholarship were focused on programming and community events, including art exhibits featuring Senegal and Ghana and the 2019 “Taste of Africa” event which was a cross-campus collaboration between Xavier University, Ashé Cultural Arts Center, and the Tulane Mellon Graduate Program in Community-Engaged Scholarship. This event included performances of African dance from the Xavier performing arts department and African cuisine provided by the Tulane African student association. This project connected universities, students and the community via the celebration of African art and culture creating a legacy of cooperation and collaboration between Xavier University and the Tulane Mellon program that has led to increased scholarship and programming across campuses focused on the intersection between community-engaged service learning and social justice. Caleb had a different perspective than Dr. Lilly, as his work did not directly influence his dissertation; however, he noted this work as providing him with valuable program management and planning skills within the community engagement framework and allowed him to learn about the interdisciplinary structure of culture and ethnic studies.
Finally, we heard from Megan Flattley, who came from the PhD program in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane. During her tenure in the Mellon program, Megan worked as a with the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane, to develop the innovative exhibition Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women of Louisiana. This project was developed “to address the issue of mass incarceration in the state of Louisiana” in partnership with Operation Restoration and Women with a Vision. Megan and her partners interviewed 30 formerly incarcerated women who were then partnered with artists of their choosing that the museum commissioned to create art based on these women’s stories. Megan spoke about how this project was formed as a response to how museums shape knowledge, and how she as a community-engaged scholar worked to create a way for communities to actively participate in decision making and other processes of exhibition building. This sort of social innovation allows for community engagement to serve as an avenue for changing how we as a society consider the production of art and knowledge. This ground-breaking exhibition has been presented at multiple galleries nationwide. Moreover, work on a new exhibition is currently in progress focused on juvenile incarceration slated for 2022.
This panel discussion provided a fascinating and intimate glimpse into the stories of four incredible Mellon Fellowship alumni. Many thanks to all participants, the Center for Public Service and the Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking. If you are interested in learning more about the panel discussion and the work of the Tulane Mellon Graduate program and these amazingly talented alumni please see the full recording of the event here.
If you would like to read a transcript of the event, please find one here.
We hope you enjoyed this first instalment of our blog! Stay tuned for more snapshots from the Tulane Mellon Graduate Program!