Research & Programming

Setting the Data Free: Creating a Descendant-Led Digital Humanities Lab and Network

Overview

This project aims to identify and address the power asymmetries in resources and capacity that undermine descendant control over data used to construct historical narratives and land-use policies that support the survival of historic Black towns and settlements. At the heart of this work is safeguarding the data, ephemera, and material culture associated with placemaking history and grassroots preservation practices.

A public symposium of practitioners, including descendants, academics, and technology experts, will discuss descendant data governance and its implications. Insights gained from the symposium will help shape the development of a descendants-only virtual space designed to document, preserve, and share sensitive descendant data.

Project Lead

DTD Lab Seed Grant Recipient

Andrea Roberts

Affiliation

Associate Professor, Urban + Environmental Planning
Director, Center for Cultural Landscapes

Bio

Dr. Andrea Roberts is an advocate, educator, and scholar of Black placemaking histories and practices in the Americas, and a descendant of the founders of historic Black settlements in Texas. Her 12 years of professional experience in housing, government, and advocacy inform her scholarly efforts to bring marginalized, historic Black communities to the center of planning practice and research. She is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, where she also serves as Faculty Director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes (CCL) and is an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Architectural History. She is also the owner of the consultancy, Freedom Colonies Project, LLC, through which she provides creative research design for civic art & landscape design projects, coaches emerging preservationists, and gives keynote lectures. Her peer-reviewed and public scholarship on Black placemaking and placekeeping frame these concepts as part of a long tradition of resistance and freedom-seeking in the Americas. She’s published in The Journal of Planning History, Buildings and Landscapes, the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, Planning Theory & Practice, and Environmental Justice. She has received awards for her engaged scholarship from The Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Urban Affairs Association.

She created The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas and Grassroots Preservation Study in 2014 to identify and map disappearing settlements and their historic properties through participatory heritage conservation and community storytelling. The Project has become a vehicle through which students, advocates, and volunteers record locations and stories about 533 Black settlements in the state. Under the auspices of the CCL, she now leads the Mellon Foundation-supported Outsider Preservation Initiative, which will expand The Project beyond Texas to support projects in Louisiana, Virginia, California, and Canada. She is currently authoring a book, Never Sell the Land: Place Persistence as Resistance, about her experiences recording place origin stories and grassroots Black preservation practices that sustain cultural resilience, which has been accepted for publication by The University of Texas Press.

Planners and researchers throughout the US have applied her approaches to challenge the invisibility of Black settlements and to promote recognition. She has received awards and fellowships for her engaged research methods and scholarship and serves on various boards and research teams. Dr. Roberts was Co-Project Director for the 2022 and 2024 NEH Summer Institutes for Higher Education Faculty—"Towards a People's History of Landscape: Black & Indigenous Histories.” Dr. Roberts serves on PolicyLink’s Spatial Futures Fellowship Advisory Committee and the Urban Landscape Studies Advisory Board at Dumbarton Oaks and is a steering committee member for the Black Experiences with Planning in Canada partnership and research study. Dr. Roberts is an advisory council member of the Oatlands National Trust for Historic Preservation Site. She supports the Aya Symposium, an annual Texas Freedom Colonies conference created for and by descendants.

Dr. Roberts holds a Ph.D. in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin (2016), an M.A. in Government Administration and Public Finance from the University of Pennsylvania (2006), and a B.A. in Political Science from Vassar College (1996).

Setting the Data Free: Creating a Descendant-Led Digital Humanities Lab and Network

Overview

Project Lead

Andrea Roberts

Connect with the DTD Lab

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