Future Histories Lab brings to light hidden histories uncovered through collaborative research by students, faculty and community members, and proposes new possible futures. Here are examples of websites, podcasts and research projects created by UC Berkeley students that represent our approach.
Future Histories Lab invites community organizations to propose collaborative, public-facing projects like these to be co-created by students and local residents.
The following projects were developed in courses or publications supported by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship Program, the American Cultures Creative Discovery Program, Digital Humanities at Berkeley, and the American Studies program. They demonstrate the type of projects Future Histories Lab undertakes, often in collaboration with other UC Berkeley programs.
The Buzz Studio:
Planning Equitable Cities for People and Pollinators
The Buzz Studio partnered with Peralta Hacienda Historical Park in Oakland’s Fruitvale District to explore ways to create a more equitable multispecies city. Working with the park and its neighbors, the Buzz Studio team focused on pollinators. Small but mighty creatures, more that 85% of the world’s flowering plants rely on bees, birds, butterflies, bats, and many kinds of insects to reproduce. In turn, people rely on them to pollinate one-third of the food crops that feed the world. Yet pollinators are in decline across the globe. Since cities can actually be pollinator hotspots, could Oakland support a larger and more diverse population of pollinators? If so, how? Buzz Studio students conducted research about the park and its history, and the social and environmental justice challenges faced by the Fruitvale District to ground a set of proposals designed to make the park and its adjacent neighborhoods more pollinator-friendly as well as greener, cooler, and more walkable for local residents. This website here presents the results of this research. This studio course was taught in Spring 2022.
Plywood Stories: Interviews with Oakland Protest Mural Artists
Students created an important archive of the ephemeral murals that sprang up in Oakland in 2020 in response to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. The students interviewed a number of the artists who had created the murals and developed public podcasts to share their voices. The students also made augmented reality projects that allow people to take a walking tour of the former sites of the murals–most of which have now been taken down–and use their smartphones to see the murals as they were in 2020 and to hear the voices of the artists. The course was taught by Pablo Gonzalez, who has created a podcasting studio on campus to train students in community-based work.
Monument to Extraction:
Walking California History at the Albany Bulb
Future Histories Lab students created a self-guided tour through the history of California at this mostly uncapped landfill that juts into San Francisco Bay. They made art installations, an audio walking tour, podcast, a website and augmented and virtual reality projects. These all use landscapes visible from this shoreline, as well as the rubble underfoot, to tell the stories of 19th-century Chinese laborers, World War II migration, housing segregation, and global container shipping. This project, called Monument to Extraction, was a featured exhibition in the global art project Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss and was created in Art 160/City Planning 190, Ghosts and Visions, taught by Susan Moffat. It was featured in Berkeleyside, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the East Bay Times.
The Berkeley Revolution website presents histories and previously unavailable archival materials from the disabled people’s movement, LGBTQ organizations, the Black Panthers, and more. Students in Scott Saul’s and Greg Castillo’s course East Bay Revolution (American Studies 102/Environmental Design 109) contributed articles and ephemera to this ongoing project, which has been cited by New York Times reporters and others in researching stories including profiles of Kamala Harris. The Berkeley Revolution was featured in Berkeleyside.
Students created “paper monuments” to forgotten heroes and places to replace decommissioned Confederate monuments in New Orleans. They also interviewed local residents involved in battles over redevelopment of the Claiborne Avenue corridor in this course taught by Anna Brand and Bryan Wagner, New Orleans: Historical Memory and Urban Design, Landscape Architecture 154/American Studies 102.
Street Art of the Mission District
Students created visual essays including this one on the connection between theater and street art in the Mission District of San Francisco. Developed as Theater 25AC, Performance in América, an American Cultures Creative Discovery Course, by Assoc. Prof. of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies Angela Marino.
Students participated in collecting data and narratives for the independent Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a data-visualization and storytelling collective documenting dispossession. With contributions from the Global Urban Humanities Initiative.