The 2024 Virginia Forum recently named work completed for a Center for Mason Legacies course as its Best Graduate Student Paper this year. The prize went to Mandy Katz, now CML's communications director, for a web exhibit she completed as a master's student in spring 2023, Fade to White - Ilda and the Right to Remain. The course, "Black Lives Next Door," was co-taught by professors Wendi Manuel-Scott and George Oberle, CML's director.
Funded by a Lyrasis Catalyst grant, Black Lives Next Door pedagogy innovated the melding of geographical data, critical archival analysis, and deliberately "affective" approaches to researching Black narratives and history in Northern Virginia. Manuel-Scott's grounding in the School of Integrative Studies and Oberle's expertise in history and library science enabled them to offer an interdisciplinary approach to digital history that combined reconsiderations of space in storytelling with antiracist methodology to uncover "hidden" or overlooked stories. Graduate and undergraduate students in the course presented final projects as web exhibits on the Omeka platform, in which they trained as part of the course.
Katz's research addressed the disappearance of a Fairfax County enclave called Ilda. Used today as a disembodied label for predominantly white spaces including a community pool and a real estate subdivision, the name "Ilda" originally referred to a Black child, Matilda, and the 1890s community founded by her parents and other Black artisan-landowners on Little River Turnpike near Annandale. Katz's personal ties to Annandale, where her husband grew up and her mother-in-law still lives, led her to wonder why the community's Black landowners dispersed in the early 1900s. After leaving, she further asked, mainly due to Jim Crow repression, where did they go? The course's emphasis on geographic storytelling helped her trace them to locations as far as Michigan and New England and as near as Southwest D.C., where she herself lives.
Katz shared this research as part of the 2024 Virginia Forum panel "Geographies of Inequity in Northern Virginia," moderated by University of Mary Washington Professor Krystyn Moon. Hers was one of six CML student papers presented at the conference; Oberle, their mentor, also appeared on the dais, as a moderator.
August 02, 2024