Multigenerational Engaged Storytelling

Student Summer Institute

In the summer of 2024, ten students from Hostos Community College and LaGuardia Community College engaged with ideas about boundaries and crossings, interacted with documentarians and oral historians, and produced their own multimedia stories about multigenerational crossings of historical, sociological, geographical, or other divides. They interviewed family and members of their community to produce these stories. Their artifacts, contained in this digital archive, encompass narratives of cultural crossings, familial re-makings, immigrant perseverance, maternal inheritances, educational persistence, religious capaciousness, and foster care. We believe that multigenerational stories rooted in history and culture can help students to clarify their experiences of identity and collective memory, recover heritage, enrich conceptions of the world, and bring their voices to the public. By integrating academic research, training for students, and student-creations of digital artefacts to engage scholarly and community audiences, this project hypothesizes that multigenerational storytelling is a form of grassroots memorialization and community building.

We invite you to explore and to listen with kindness and empathy.

This project was supported by the City University of New York’s Interdisciplinary Research Grant and led by Tram Nguyen and Bijoyeta Das.

CREDITS & SPECIAL THANKS:

A project likes this requires the collaboration and support of many. We would like to thank:

Manifold Curator: Emily Ramos

Speakers: Sarah Key, Writing Center Poet-in-Practice, Hostos Community College; Jake Boritt, Documentary Filmmaker; Lynn Lewis, Oral Historian; Jason Schafer, Associate Professor, LaGuardia Community College; and Stephen Petrus, Professor, LaGuardia and Wagner Archives.

Production Assistants: Writing Mentors - Maya Abdoussala, Shaneka Crossman, Lauren Genao, Miguel Madrid, Kyanna Pratt, and Eva Soriano.

Illustration - Camila Estrada, Jacob Hilado, Wayne Wiggan.

Video and Sound - Kevin Liu

PROJECT DIRECTORS:

Tram Nguyen is Professor of English at Hostos Community College, specializing in literary modernism and philosophies of subjectivity and ethics. A selection of her scholarship has been published in The Comparatist, Women's Studies Quarterly, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and edited monographs Readings in Ethics and New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject. Currently she directs the Hostos Writing Center and the English Supplemental Instruction Program, mentoring and training peer tutors to promote retention and academic success.

Bijoyeta Das is an Assistant Professor and Director of Journalism Major at LaGuardia. She has reported for Al Jazeera, Radio France, Radio Netherlands, Deutsche Welle covering South and Southeast Asia, Africa, US, and Turkey. Das has worked in media development and humanitarian communications for Action Africa Help International, European Journalism Center, Women Deliver and Metta Center for Non-violence. As a fellow for Columbia University’s Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability institute, she documented stories of survivors of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh. She also wrote a creative non-fiction biography about Haiti’s first female prime minister.

Cover Image © Vectonauta on Freepik

© Nguyen & Das

Metadata

  • publisher
    Manifold @CUNY
  • publisher place
    New York, NY