Princeton's Inaugural Community-Engaged Research Institute (CERI)
Food Justice and Oral History
Sponsored by the Derian Student Internship Fund, School of Public & International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton Humanities Council, Princeton Alliance for Collaborative Research & Innovation, Princeton Food Project, Department of Anthropology
This gathering of academic and community scholar-practitioners was designed to highlight outstanding community-engaged research, teaching, and mentored-undergraduate research focusing on The Heirloom Gardens Project. The institute provided a forum for exchanging knowledge, collaboration, and building coalitions rooted in rigorous scholarship and commitments to systems change. The gathering also served as the launch of the 2024 Derian Summer Internship Program, a faculty-mentored, community-engaged undergraduate research program.
The Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project (HGP) is a collaboration of Princeton University, Spelman College, and the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance to collect oral histories of people who have worked to preserve Black and Indigenous seed and foodways throughout the Southeastern United States and Appalachia. It is currently funded by the Princeton Alliance for Collaborative Research and Innovation, an initiative of the Office of the Dean for Research at Princeton University. Working across six sites over two years, students and faculty will work with communities to interview and archive the stories of farmers, gardeners, chefs, community organizers, local historians and others who have been actively sustaining rich farming, culinary, and medicinal traditions. To date, HGP has collected over seventy interviews and is currently processing the files to be deposited in the oral history archive at Spelman College and hosted for public access by Atlanta University Center’s Woodruff Library. HGP is also developing a story corp training kit that Ujamaa and other community organizations can use to continue conducting oral histories for the project after the initial funding expires. HGP intends to continue its work in other regions of the country and to support collection and archiving of oral histories on this topic for years to come.
The gathering featured the first public presentation of the archive of the Heirloom Gardens Project housed at Spelman College and operated by the Atlanta University Center Woodruff Library. The first batch of free, open access oral history interviews is available here. The CERI event brought several members of Ujamaa to campus, along with Carla J. Thomas McGinnis, Assistant Director of Council Operations and Museum Initiatives National Museum of African American History and Culture and Eric Calhoun, Supervisory Horticulturist with Smithsonian Gardens. Princeton Professors Hanna Garth (Anthropology) and Tessa Desmond (SPIA) are working with Thomas McGinnis and Calhoun to envision a multimodal experience featuring the Heirloom Gardens Project stories at the Smithsonian. The event included breakout sessions to brainstorm and plan the best ways to publicize and highlight the archive.
Cultural Anthropologist and Professor Emerita at the University of Georgia, Virginia Nazarea, spoke of her long career collecting oral histories among diverse groups of seed savers. Mama Ira Wallace, known as the Godmother of Southern Seeds, rounded out the day with a keynote featuring her lifelong work collecting seeds and their stories. Both Nazarea and Wallace praised the Heirloom Gardens Project for centering the importance of seed stories and recognizing the essential role of oral history in ethnobotany, biodiversity, and conservation work. Many attendees expressed their gratitude and appreciation for Princeton’s support of community engaged work.
Special thanks to the Department of Anthropology for their coverage of the event.