Our Methodology
The MWMS project has from the start been a collaborative one, bringing together scholars and practitioners from a wide range of arts, humanities, social science fields to share their findings, discuss common questions and themes, and identify the driving interpretative priorities of the volume.
In doing our work, we have sought to develop new conceptions of the “segregated city” and its relevant boundaries and pathways, and have prioritized site-oriented approaches that generate new vocabulary and frameworks for explaining the lived realities of racialized urban spaces.
In doing their site-based studies, our contributors have given consideration to
the “making” and unmaking” of a given site, starting with its long material and political history, and attending to defining episodes of development, transformation, erasure, etc.;
the dynamics of racialized experience at the site, past and present, and how they become materialized;
various acts of memory and forgetting at the site, including whether / how it has been recognized as a place of racialized life;
how a site becomes embedded within, and in turn shapes, broader political-historical geographies of race in St. Louis;
how a site can also be the locus of political resistance, transformational Black memory work, and democratic love, or their opposites: repression, denialism, amnesia, cooption of resources, or full-scale material alienation or even obliteration.
Markings on one of the four poles at the basketball court in St. Louis Place Park. October 31, 2016. Photo by John Early.