Understanding Deep Roots, Jacqueline Royster

Jacqueline Royster, jacqueline.royster@ac.gatech.edu

Universities across the nation are expanding their footprints in urban space, encroaching on the neighborhoods that surround them while simultaneously exercising the view of themselves as economic drivers for the community/region/the nation/the world and sometimes as drivers of social change and urban sustainability. This working group is designed to engage participants with community members at this point of critical intersection, when community knowledge (as we learn to hear and appreciate community-based knowledge, expertise, and experiences as knowledge) meets campus knowledge (in this case the knowledge, expertise, and experiences that we have developed in rhetorical studies). We will read theories of the neighborhood-university intersection by scholars such as Harley Etienne and Mindy Thompson Fullilove; we will listen and learn from community elders; and we will work with elders to design visualizations and other digital representations of the Gateway Precinct and University Corridor that promote the urban sustainability, progress, and prosperity of their communities.