Introduction
In Spring 1968, the Afro-American Student Union (AASU) issued a bold proposal for an interdisciplinary Black Studies program which incorporated community-based programming. Black students, the proposal argued, “[could] no longer afford to be educated away from their origins. Henceforth, our education must speak to the needs of our community and our people” (The Berkeley Revolution). The Third World Liberation Front adapted these documents and reiterated the necessity of a liberatory education (The Berkeley Revolution). The lengthy student strikes led by these groups at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, emerging out of broader organizing efforts in higher education, created the first ethnic studies programs in the United States (Rogers 2012). The program proposals identified community-based learning and empowering students to work in their communities as crucial aspects of Ethnic Studies, and indeed, of education. For bell hooks, such an education is rooted in an inherent hopefulness that emerges from “witnessing individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them” (2003, xiv). Drawing on and learning from the “life-enhancing vibrancy of diverse communities of resistance” thus enables students to connect to and meaningfully participate in their communities (2003, xiv).
This article connects practices of community-engaged learning and minimal computing through a digital project called A Black Physician's Story: The Douglas Conner Digital Project (referred to as Conner Digital Project henceforth). This is an ongoing project undertaken by the Digital Ethnic Studies class in the Department of English at Mississippi State University. The Conner Digital Project presents a multimodal digital exhibit on the life and legacy of Dr. Douglas L Conner (1920–1998), one of the first Black doctors in Starkville, Mississippi, and a local civil rights leader. Dr. Conner founded the Oktibbeha County Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and played a crucial role in desegregating the county public school system and Mississippi State University. The digital project draws on Conner’s autobiography, A Black Physician’s Story, the Douglas L Conner Papers (held by Mississippi State University Libraries), and scholarly sources to explore school desegregation, economic boycott and protests, anti-discrimination lawsuits, political activism, hospital and medical services, and other topics related to Starkville and Oktibbeha County. Currently, the project houses a dozen critical essays, digital maps, transcriptions, and short oral histories.
In this article, we outline our project goals, process, and outcomes, focusing especially on the pedagogical significance of undertaking community-engaged learning (CEL) with a minimal computing approach.2 Specifically, we highlight how CEL fosters an emotional connection to literature and textual studies, and encourages students to build digital humanities projects attentive to community concerns and priorities while honing their own research, writing, and digital skills. Furthermore, critical digital making enables classroom conversations on the risks, affordances, and responsibilities of discussing topics related to race and racism on online platforms. Finally, we note challenges and future opportunities for the digital project and this pedagogical approach. As the project is built on free tools and without substantial institutional or technical resources, it operates, we believe, as a form of minimalist digital humanities pedagogy (Savonick 2022). We thus conclude by addressing the necessity of digital infrastructure, funding, and other kinds of resources to sustain scholarly endeavors—the very resources which are currently being undermined at the state and federal levels. In Mississippi, the paucity of such resources and the overall economic constraints faced by many students even before the current moment have long necessitated adaptations and adjustments.
We understand minimal computing in the vein of Alex Gil’s 2015 blog post, where he notes that minimal computing is “an injunction to constantly repeat the question, ‘what do we need?’” Gil emphasizes minimal computing as an approach to “learning how to produce, disseminate and preserve digital scholarship ourselves, without the help we can’t get, even as we fight to build infrastructures we need…” (Gil 2015). Risam and Gil (2022) further observe that minimal computing is a response to “some set of constraints” in the scholarly and lived environment, but also pushes for “decision-making process driven by the local contexts in which scholarship is being created.” Minimal computing asks what we can build with what we have. Our approach to minimalist digital humanities pedagogy was thus guided by Conner’s autobiography and the experiences narrated by Black community activists and leaders who visited our classroom. As we learned, community members in Starkville and Oktibbeha County undertook civil rights struggles even in the absence of material resources and despite systemic obstructions. In fact, institutional sites (such as jails) were often coercive instruments used to thwart activist struggles, and supposedly progressive institutions (such as schools and universities) were desegregated only after Black leaders and communities undertook protracted legal suits, and/or enrolled despite the risk of violence. What sustained protests, economic boycotts, and lengthy legal proceedings was the mutual care and community organizing at a local level, with the support of activist networks cultivated at the regional and national levels.
This project pushed us to not just study the literary representation, oral histories, and archives of the local civil rights movement and the decades of activism that followed, but also to ask how we connect to those community histories and networks today. Despite being fixed in the national imagination in narratives of systemic inequities and racial violence, Mississippi is also a site of belonging, one claimed as home by our community members and many of our students. Community-engaged learning respects local place-making and draws on student knowledge and interest in their own communities. Moreover, rather than seeing Mississippi as the exception to the progressivism of the American nation-state, we understand that Mississippi history is American history. Its vexed past and ongoing challenges are representative of the American nation but so too are the traditions of organizing and the pursuit of justice and equality. The urgent challenge for educators is to enable students to think critically about the state’s past in order to envision and work towards a more equitable future for all. The literature classroom, which develops analytical and communication skills, values the work of imagination, and makes space for reflection, expression, and creativity, is an important site for this liberatory education.
Project Description and Process
The Digital Ethnic Studies class was created by Dr. Dhanashree Thorat in the English Department to introduce students to scholarship at the intersection of Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities.3 The class incorporates digital methods, digital playdays (workshop-style introduction to digital tools like StorymapJS), and multimodal assignments alongside literary and scholarly texts. Furthermore, as a formally designated ‘Community-Engaged-Learning’ course by the Center for Community-Engaged Learning on campus, we operate on principles of reciprocity, community partnership, and collaborative building (MSState CCEL). This designation implies that students have worked with a community partner during the semester in some kind of substantive project related to course outcomes. Thus far, two iterations of the class have worked with the Oktibbeha County Branch of the NAACP to create the Conner Digital Project. The digital project was built on WordPress (through the free hosting option) to ensure digital accessibility for community members, especially younger people who may be unaware of local histories.
Students first read Conner’s autobiography in class and discuss how the text represents the experiences of Black people in the U.S. South during the Jim Crow era, the civil rights movement, and the ongoing struggle for equality and justice. The text enables rich conversations about Black childhood in Mississippi (Conner was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi), the myriad problems of a segregated education system and the importance of HBCUs (Conner attended Alcorn State University), and the experiences of Black service members (Conner was drafted and served in Okinawa during World War II). In subsequent classes, we were joined by members of the Oktibbeha NAACP and Dr. Conner’s family members (Ms Yvette Conner and Ms Divian Conner) who shared their first-hand knowledge of Dr. Conner’s work and life in Oktibbeha County. Through class meetings and one-on-one conversations, we developed project goals and outcomes. Students also spent class sessions in the archives with the Douglas Conner Papers (referred to as Conner Papers henceforth).4 Our visits to the archives were supported by Ms. Carrie Mastley, Assistant Professor and Curator of Material Culture in the libraries, who guided students on archival provenance, preservation, context, and more.
At the end of Spring 2024, English majors acted as project ambassadors and facilitated a public launch event. Students conducted hands-on activities, including collecting short oral histories, a transcribe-a-thon for visitors to help us transcribe Dr. Conner’s handwritten documents, and a scavenger hunt. Mrs. Yulanda Haddix, then President of Oktibbeha NAACP, spoke about the significance of Dr. Conner’s legacy. Mr. Chris Taylor, Past-President of Oktibbeha NAACP, led a tour of Black history locations in downtown Starkville for students and visitors and we walked to Dr. Conner’s medical office as part of the tour. As Brennan (2016) observes, public digital humanities does not imply just that a project or research is online—rather, it must “place communities, or other public audiences” at its core. The public showcase was intended to resituate the Conner Digital Project in the sites and community it is grounded in. In Spring 2025, a second class added new critical commentaries and digital maps to the project, and each subsequent class is slated to develop existing and new components to the project pertaining to local literature and history.
In the three sections below, we outline specific project outcomes related to community-engaged, minimal computing pedagogies as they pertain to literary studies and digital humanities.
Connecting Students to the Community
The Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement defines community engagement as “collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity” (Carnegie). Berard and Ravelli (2021) emphasize the benefits of CEL to students, such as improving students’ communication, academic and life skills, sense of civic responsibility, decision making, and research while uplifting universities and community organizations (199). Such engagement can take different forms, ranging from outreach and consulting to shared leadership and community-driven partnerships (MSState CCEL). At Mississippi State University, community-engaged learning (CEL) emphasizes reciprocal exchange to “enrich the educational experience of students, teach civic responsibility, and meet the needs of a community” (MSState CCEL).
Drawing on these CEL values to build the Conner Digital Project was crucial as the project focuses on a local figure important to the community. Though Dr. Conner is memorialized in downtown Starkville, most students who have taken this class have expressed that they were unaware of his legacy. The medical clinic where he practiced is in a dilapidated condition today, and unknown to many despite being located just off a downtown street named after him. As such, learning from Black community members about their first-hand accounts of interacting with him and how best to preserve his legacy digitally ensured that the project was built ethically and respected the wishes of community members. Through interactions with community members, students gained a nuanced understanding of Dr. Conner’s life while enriching their perspective on Starkville and Oktibbeha County, where Mississippi State University’s main campus is located. Mrs. Annie Dancer, a 94-year-old community elder, described how she participated in local protests led by Dr. Conner, sometimes without food or water. Her visit to the class helped students connect their textual studies to the lived experiences of Black community members. A well-known figure locally, Mrs. Dancer was greeted and hugged by several campus workers who recognized her as she walked to our class. Ensuing conversations drew campus community members into our project and, in turn, brought students into community spaces and discussions.
For example, a campus worker who had formerly been taught by Mrs. Dancer spotted her outside our class and came over to greet her and ask why she was visiting campus. Upon learning about our digital project, he immediately shared that he had been born in Dr. Conner’s clinic. After hearing this, other community members who were visiting that day also shared that they had been delivered by Dr. Conner. One visitor, Ms. Willette DuVall,5 called Dr. Conner the “everything” doctor for the Black community in Starkville. Due to poverty and racism, it was difficult for Black people to get access to specialists, so Dr. Conner handled all manner of medical care in his clinic. In his autobiography, Dr. Conner briefly mentioned delivering babies in his clinic because Black mothers were either unable to give birth at segregated medical facilities or lacked the resources to go to a hospital. This topic was briefly noted in the autobiography, but its significance and the impact of a single Black doctor became so much clearer that day as we saw a living legacy personified by community members brought into the world by Dr. Conner. This example emphasizes how CEL can help students to understand the intensely personal aspects of Literary Studies as well as Ethnic Studies. Several students later took up various aspects of Dr. Conner’s medical career for discussion in their critical essays for the digital project.
Lum and Jacob (2025) point out that CEL is an essential tool for Ethnic Studies so that students can acquire just this kind of grassroots, lived experience, which in turn helps them develop a deeper understanding of course material. Community testimonials guided research by helping students know where to look or find new leads to follow. It showed them not only how to research these communities respectfully, but it also gave them the emotional clarity about why projects like these are important. One of our class visitors, Mr. Chris Taylor, a U.S. Army veteran and Past-President of Oktibbeha County, described his relationship with Dr. Conner and how he was a major inspiration for his leadership because of his deep care for the community.6 During a Q&A with students, Mr. Taylor discussed the establishment of a segregation academy with public resources in Starkville while the public school district was being desegregated. Many such segregation academies were set up in Mississippi in the late 1960s to circumvent school integration (Grady and Hoffman 2018).7 In Starkville, city and school officials denied the precise circumstances about public funding, but news articles from the time and Dr. Conner’s autobiography corroborated Mr. Taylor’s story. As public school systems in Mississippi experience stark disparities in funding, resource allocation, and educational outcomes, stories like these prompted students to look anew at the educational landscape they had grown up in. One student, who had grown up in Starkville, took up research for this story and made it the focus of their project contribution.
Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) can thus encourage students to learn and do more for their local community and grow as writers, scholars, and community members. As students began to question how historical narratives are crafted, literary canons shaped, and what/who gets erased and invisibilized, they developed and expressed a desire to redress these silences, gaps, and absences. The personal connections with community members gave them an entry point to participate in decades-long conversations and find their own voice in making a change. Once given a place to connect with, students were actively encouraged to take part in their community around them and develop a nuanced understanding of issues plaguing our society. If, as Meredith Lyn Jeffers (2023) argues, students acting as agents of social change is a core aspect of the humanities, CEL can then become a method to encourage future generations to dismantle systems of oppression by educating students on their real-time and long-term impact.
Building Digital Skillsets through Critical Making
To prepare for the Conner Digital Project, students conducted hands-on digital playdays to learn about digital tools such as Tableau, Google Maps, StoryMapJS, and WordPress. They also studied digital projects such as Mapping Police Violence, Slave Voyages, Torn Apart/Separados, and A Shaky Truce to understand the affordances of digital platforms in facilitating critical conversations on race and racism. Developing basic proficiency with digital tools, digital methods (such as text analysis, data visualization, and digital archiving), and critical digital making was a crucial part of the class. Digital skills are defined as “the ability to find, evaluate, use, share, and create content using digital devices, such as computers and smartphones” (UNLV ThriveDX). Digital skills are marketable as they can prepare students for a wide range of careers (Wosh, Hajo, and Katz 2012), and students can highlight these skillsets on their CVs or resumes. The digital project itself emphasized that students learn how to write for a digital audience and develop a basic understanding of tools such as StoryMapsJS and WordPress. At the same time, the class fostered an understanding of how students can apply their “knowledge of the digital as a tool of community building” (Hsu 2016). Class conversations thus addressed accessibility, multimodality, and writing for a digital and public audience. Rather than simply prioritizing material access to digital technologies, the class was predicated on what Banks (2005) calls transformative access, which fosters critical making in all “interfaces of American life.”
The class prioritized the use of free digital platforms, which students could learn to use without technical expertise. StorymapJS was used to create timelines, Google Docs for collaborative writing and editing, and the project was hosted on WordPress.8 Students were given editorial access to WordPress during a guided class workshop so they could familiarize themselves with the backend of the platform. Students also used their phones to record snippets of oral histories. At various points in the term, we were a paper-tech class, i.e., we used pencil and paper to take notes in the archives and start doing transcriptions of hand-written material. Certainly, there are drawbacks to using proprietary platforms like WordPress, and this design choice diverges from certain forms of minimal computing, which eschew out-of-the-box solutions. As Risam and Gil (2022) point out, such platforms hide the systems and labor involved in producing and maintaining them. The same could be said of Knight Lab’s StorymapJS and similar tools. In this case, we sacrificed transparency and fuller control over production of knowledge (compared to using Jekyll, for example) for ease of use and replicability. WordPress, in particular, is more accessible for students to learn. Even more crucially, it is easily replicable compared to solutions that require coding—the Conner Digital Project could thus serve as a prototype for other community groups and communities to take up their own local storytelling projects. The project itself could also be transferred to our community partners or to other faculty without any expectation of substantive technical knowledge.
Overall, digital and public scholarship remains vital as an innovative and accessible means of discussing literary texts, historical events, and community concerns. In the context of community-engaged scholarship, this digital project thus accomplished two objectives - the “development of new knowledge” whereby the scholar and community work together to “[build] on the depth or scope of the original knowledge” and “dissemination of new knowledge” to “share with others what they’ve discovered together” (Franz 2009, 36–37). Though the digital project drew on extant material (the autobiography, archival papers, oral histories, and scholarly texts), students made creative and critical choices on how to interpret, analyze, remix, and present these sources to craft their project essays. This process was intended to create “a sense of agency that promotes intentional and integrative learning, information literacy” (Conefrey 39). Students could choose topics (as long as they could relate them to Dr. Conner’s work and legacy), and then decide how to present the information in a way that was readable, informative, and visually engaging.
Students were faced with certain choices that they would not have when writing a traditional essay, for example, how to write on a digital platform. Accessibility, in this case, meant writing about historical, literary, and scholarly texts for a public audience, including younger audiences, and ensuring that the digital presentation of content incorporated principles of universal design. Accessibility also meant, however, encouraging community involvement in the university’s archival holdings by inviting community members to browse the Conner Papers with the class, bringing copies to the public launch day, and transcribing some of the handwritten documents in the collection for the project website. It was important for students to consider how the remit of archives incorporates not just preservation of materials but also making them accessible and available for future generations.
Due to the project being released publicly, it also came with certain risks and responsibilities that students needed to be aware of (Hicks and Turner 59). It was important to write with nuance, care and diligent research on matters of race and racism, as this project is public and could inform how others perceive their topics. Most of the students were English majors and accustomed to writing about fictional characters, but for this project, they were talking about real people, which necessitated respect and ethical awareness. Interactions with Dr. Conner’s family and various community members also pushed this sense of responsibility—we had been entrusted with a story and our writing needed to channel the bold spirit which animated Dr. Conner’s activism as well as the sense of pride and joy with which community members shared in their perspectives on him. At the same time, the risks of working on such a project included concerns about racist backlash, online harassment, and more. Anonymous authoring was the default choice, with the intention that anonymity would enable students to write boldly without fear of backlash. However, students were given the final say in the matter and some students did choose to attribute authorship.
This learning process, about community-engaged digital projects and the variety of skills and knowledge involved, starts in the class but cannot be completed in the span of one semester. For one, this requires slowly building community relationships, participating in community life, and learning when, where, and how we (university-affiliated folx) can contribute. We may not have the funding and resources to conduct a large-scale, high-tech project on community or oral histories but perhaps we do not need to rush anyway, given the community-engaged process and with transformative learning as our goal. The minimal computing approach aligns here with what Moya Bailey (2021) calls “slow DH,” which values building trust and cultivating collaborative space (293). Each class thus works at a sustainable pace and with manageable goals, grounded in the idea that the project will slowly build over time, with successive iterations of the class.
Connecting to Literature and History
As an English class, the assignments, readings, and discussions were premised on students showcasing their reading and writing skills. This textual study encouraged students to make connections across time periods and hone their analytical skills by reading and interpreting different types and genres of writing. The class particularly fostered connections between literature and history, drawing on what Stephenson (1958) calls a “reciprocal relationship” as “each supplies the other with both source material and inspiration” (228). Reading Dr. Conner’s autobiography alongside the archival papers transformed a disparate set of historical texts into a compelling story. This was particularly the case for documents such as lawsuits, which most English students do not engage at the undergraduate level (unless they are pre-law students). For example, a substantive part of the Conner Papers concerns the desegregation of the Oktibbeha County school system in the 1970s and presents a multitude of documents related to a civil rights lawsuit involving the school district. Tracing the story of desegregation with just the archival texts was confusing to students (partially because the archival material is incomplete). Here, the autobiography made the archival papers accessible by narrativizing, contextualizing, and bringing a human touch to the archive. Literature, as Panikkar (2012) writes, “does not ‘happen’ outside history, but within it” (3).
Knowing the person behind the autobiography helped students imagine Dr. Conner and hear his voice and reflections as they dove into the archival documents and learned more about the significant events mentioned in the autobiography. The first-person retrospective narration used in the autobiography creates an intimate relationship between the narrator and readers, in this case, between Dr. Conner and students. For example, while working on the digital project, students showed a keen interest in Dr. Conner’s recounting of how his adopted son, Richard Holmes, desegregated Mississippi State University in 1965. The oft-repeated narrative (familiar to our students) was that MSState handled desegregation more progressively, as James Meredith faced considerable violence when he integrated the University of Mississippi. Students were thus surprised to learn from the autobiography that Dr. Conner’s family home was visited by an angry student mob after Holmes enrolled at MSState.
Dr. Conner (1985) thus described the incident: “two hundred students… marched to our home and circled it, shouting racial insults. We stayed inside, obviously frightened, but determined not to provoke any unnecessary violence (146). Though the incident ended without physical violence, Dr. Conner remembers his trepidation—a justified reaction given the assassinations of civil rights activists in Mississippi in the 1960s. One student who wrote about Richard Holmes for the digital project argued that news articles of the time underplayed or erased such simmering racial tensions and the planning undertaken by school administration to mitigate threats. Another student observed that the news articles used respectability politics “to appease a white audience and shine a better light on the university.” What was absent in the news reporting was the human touch—the concern and fear expressed by Dr. Conner as a father with an extended family in Starkville. Both student contributors thus sought to foreground the emotional turmoil and exhaustion experienced by Dr. Conner, his family, and the local Black community throughout this integration process.
This emotional connection to the text, and the people and community centered in the text, was also fostered by community and family members visiting the classroom. Seeing Mrs Annie Dancer and Ms. Yvette Conner (one of Dr. Conner’s daughters) in class helped students to see how close this history is to our present day. The pastness of historical events was shaken when black and white photos and typewritten documents turned into people who were in the class with us. These interactions also impressed upon students the urgent need for preserving community memories, especially with community elders. This became especially clear when Mr. Chris Taylor walked the class through significant Black history sites in downtown Starkville. According to Mr. Taylor, most of the places that are integral parts of the community’s history and culture in this area have been destroyed. Some shops and houses have been demolished, while others, including Dr. Conner’s clinic, are left in a poor state. Students would not have known Dr. Conner’s clinic had it not been pointed out during the tour. This highlights the fact that some important parts of history, like community voices, memories, and sites, are lost because they are not preserved. These are people and places that bring the younger generation closer to history and help them to understand their past, appreciate their culture, and get involved in their communities. Unfortunately, Mr. Taylor passed away unexpectedly later that year, and we lost yet another community figure loved by many.
By engaging with different community members and their viewpoints, students also had the opportunity to learn about diverse individual and collective experiences. Students heard from some community members who had been lifelong activists, while others shared the reasons why they had been unable to join boycotts and protests. Their stories explored different aspects of society represented in the autobiography and emphasized the notion that “literature embraces a wide variety of subject matter, representing ‘settings,’ behavioral patterns, and ideas in their complex interrelationships” (Albrecht 426). In a genuine moment of reciprocity, which is a guiding principle for community-engaged learning, we also discovered that some of our local community members did not know about Dr. Conner’s autobiography, and several expressed an interest in reading it and hearing how their community history was represented in the book. Students thus had an opportunity to share what they had read in a collaborative exchange of ideas.
Challenges and Future Plans
The Digital Ethnic Studies class has been offered twice so far. The course will continue to maintain a high expectation for scholarly rigor, ethical research practices, and interdisciplinary and intertextual connections while encouraging students to develop digital skills. From a student perspective, the community-engaged learning and digital methods employed in the course were demanding and time-intensive. While they are familiar with conducting a literary analysis, they had to learn how to work with digital methods and how to pursue a community-engaged digital project. Yet, the community-engaged work was also enriching. In student reflections, one student observed that reading the autobiography, the archival texts, and talking to the community made them “rethink how Starkville got to be where it is,” and another student said the community-engaged learning in the class “helps to spark interest in issues […] because it provides a sense of closeness.”9 Moreover, the ‘digital playdays,’ which encouraged exploring digital methods and platforms without an expectation of producing a complete or perfect project, were well received. One student noted in reflections that “being encouraged to experiment was fun and [they] felt a certain freedom in the class that encouraged me to do more.” The challenge of what they can do next with these digital skillsets or how they can build on that skillset remains, though. We don’t currently have centralized digital humanities infrastructure (such as a DH Lab) or a concentrated knowledge base (DH course offerings, faculty cohort, or research opportunities on digital projects), and students may thus lack the opportunity to continue honing their skills and interest in digital humanities at this institution.
From a faculty perspective, the course required substantially more coordination and planning due to the community-engaged learning components. Minimalist digital humanities pedagogy translated into student and faculty labor to cover the gap in institutional resources and personnel support. In both iterations of the class, students have worked collaboratively—not just in peer reviews but in helping each other transcribe handwritten documents, planning launch activities, and even carpooling to events. Their generosity and camaraderie with each other and willingness to learn from and with community members have been crucial in developing the project. Faculty labor demands for the class were intensive, too. In some weeks, planning included not just creating lesson plans and facilitating classroom discussion but also coordinating with library faculty, our community partner, and other stakeholders, working out technical issues with the project site, and individualized student meetings. Conducting the project in an ethical manner also required one-on-one conversations, feedback, discussions on next steps, and attending NAACP meetings before, during, and after the term. This invisible labor is hard to quantify, and may not be sustainable for pre-tenure faculty who must also produce research for tenure and promotion. This article is a starting point to make visible the labor involved in our community-engaged digital humanities project. Working with a community partner also necessitates adaptations as the organization and its members may have their own priorities, needs, and constraints, which shift from year to year. They may not be able to commit the same amount of time each year.
Yet, at a time when efforts to expand access to education and improve educational success get shut down and American higher education battles severe research funding cuts and federal and state attempts to control curricula, it is even more important for campus and local communities to work together to build our collective future. We are at a crisis point where we must confront that our research and teaching, particularly in Ethnic Studies, will have to continue not just without institutional funding and resources but despite systemic resources actively blockading critical work on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and more. When students and university workers feel demoralized, we can look back to the organizing of the civil rights movement, and the coordinated actions and mutual care which sustained the long arc of the Black liberation struggle. In Mississippi, we don’t have to look far for these stories, memories, and lessons. The staging ground of the U.S. South and the very location where we live and learn today speak to us of possibilities for a different future.
