Graduate Student Research Fellows

Charlotte Keniston
Associate Director, Shriver Center; and Ph.D. Candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture Program

Project: Digital Storytelling Workshop with Black Yield Institute

For the past year, I have been collaborating with Baltimore’s Black Yield Institute (BYI) on a website project called The Vault. The Vault seeks to create a digital cultural archive of life in the South Baltimore neighborhood of Cherry Hill and its residents’ collective work toward land and food sovereignty. This archive will be a place to document the important history of the community, and also serve as a platform for political education and liberatory action for the future. A central piece of the Vault will be a set of digital stories which will be created by Cherry Hill residents in a workshop I am planning to co-host with BYI in Late Summer to Early Fall 2022.

Fall 2022

Forrest Caskey
Ph.D. Candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture Program

Project: “‘Who Is Dorothy?’ Baltimore Drag Queens Establishing Space and Place for Queer Culture”

In this project, I seek to examine the differences (and similarities) in performativity of drag shows in traditional queer places with that of traditional heterosexual spaces during the fall and winter of 2022 in Baltimore. I aim to discover which elements of the performance and which discursive moves around the performance are lost when the performance shifts from a queer community of practice, such as a gay bar, to a heterosexual space such as a traditionally heterosexual bar, restaurant or brewery.

Spring 2023