Ashley Lucas, Residential College | 2019-2020
Community in the Classroom and on Campus is an innovative curricular initiative to push past the notion of community engagement, which usually suggests that Michigan faculty and students go out into an off-campus community, and to make people from all communities feel welcome, necessary, and included in our classrooms and on our campus. This collaboration involves the Humanities Collaboratory, the Bentley Historical Library, faculty and students from five departments on our campus, and a host of community collaborators. The project uses three courses—open to both undergraduates and graduate students—to bring members of our campus community into meaningful collaboration with currently and formerly incarcerated people. These classes all offer curricular support to the Documenting Criminalization and Confinement (DCC) project—a large scale humanities archival project, which grew out of a faculty working group called the Carceral State Project. DCC is supported by the Humanities Collaboratory and the Bentley Library for the purposes of recording and sharing the experiences of those who have experienced carceral control. The classes that are part of this initiative engage students and community collaborators in intellectual exchange, community building, and the creation of a shared database of their experiences. Each of these classes involves deep collaboration among professors, students, and community partners, meeting on our campus and engaging in coursework and discussions together. These courses also involve class projects which contribute to the larger archival work of the DCC project. In this manner, all contributors—faculty, students, and community partners—share in the labor, learning, and campus resources.