Workshops

Presenter: Julie Saylor

Description: Do spirits return, and can we communicate with the dead? Baltimore's Spiritualists thought so, but magicians worked to disprove them. Join Julie Saylor of Enoch Pratt Free Library as she discusses spirit mediums, the Spiritualist origins of the Ouija Board, and Baltimore's group of amateur magicians, the Demons Club.

Bio:Julie Saylor has served as a library associate with Enoch Pratt Free Library for over 30 years, in different departments at Central Library. Her current home is the Maryland Department, where she has created public programs about house history, historical cooking, land records, and the history of Spiritualism in Baltimore. She recently published two articles, "The Disappearing Clubhouse," in Perennial Mystics Squared, about the clubhouse of the Demons Club of Baltimore Magicians, and "Benjamin Rush, Spirit Physician?" in The Austin Seance Quarterly Journal, about healing mediums who used Dr. Benjamin Rush as their spirit control.

Presenter: Toya Smith

Description: Description: The presenter will trace the everyday cultural aspects of African Americans and how they are influenced by traditional African cultures which were brought over by our ancestors. How those aspects of culture are, in fact, ancestor veneration and a maintained belief in and participation in an African-based spirituality. It'll cover Black church, music, tradition/superstition, etc.

Bio:Toya R. Smith, known in African Traditional Religion circles as Iya Opan Eguntola Osunyemi, is a mother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a Black girl from West Baltimore. She is a priestess, a Black witch, a Conjurewoman, a lifelong Hoodoo. More than anything, she is a curator of joy.

Presenter: Orilonise Yarborough

Description: Black concepts of time have never been linear and this shows even more in our use and engagement of public history and oral history. In this talk, I will analyze the concept of sankofa, time jumping and time collapse through the use of oral history and archival research. Through the concept of time jumping and time collapse, I hope to illustrate how the design of oral history projects can support narrators, interviewers and listeners to experience history from an embodied perspective that engages the senses and creates a wrap around experience through voice, frequency, sound and memory.

Bio:Orilonise C.D. Yarborough (pronouns: she/they | pronunciation: oh-ree-low-knee-shay) is a Black queer public historian, writer, curator and creative. They recently received their Masters in Public History at North Carolina Central University, where their thesis work focused on the development of an oral history collection about the history and spread of D.C. Black Pride. Currently, Orilonise serves as the Robert F. Smith Fellow for Applied Public History at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her research interests include Black LGBTQ histories, Black women's resistance movements, and African American spiritual traditions and practices. A lover of history since childhood, Orilonise's start in the field came through her curatorial work with Black in Space, a collective of Black creatives based in D.C. who held the first virtual Black Pride festival in 2020. Orilonise has worked with institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture at Duke University, and the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. As a creative and curator, she seeks to use historical research in creative and refreshing ways, engaging in historical interpretation with the communities she calls home. In the spirit of Zora Neale Hurston, she sees the practice of historical research as "poking and prying with a purpose", allowing curiosity, creativity and connection to community to guide her curatorial exploration.

Presenter: Hess Love

This presentation starts with the origins of Hoodoo during the era of chattel slavery, highlighting its significance as a means of protection, empowerment, and survival for marginalized communities. Hoodoo practitioners integrated botanical medicine, weather observation, more-than-human mythos, and elemental forces into their practices to build livelihoods that honored place-based intangible heritage. Hoodoo was born as a cultural, social, material, and spiritual medicine to adapt to various forms of climate disaster that occurred as a result of colonialism and colonial human trafficking. This talk will center the importance of earth reverence and collective action within Hoodoo, showcasing how shared knowledge and traditions continue to foster resilience and uncover injustices in the face of environmental and social harms.

Bio:Hess Love is an archivist, ethnoecologist, storyteller, healing artist, poet, and playwright. They are currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Wilkes University and pursuing certification as a Master Naturalist. As a co-founder of the Chesapeake Conjure Society, Hess’ creative and community work as a Hoodoo historian lives at the crossroads of culture and environment. Their work is rooted in advocating for communal ways of knowing from systemically discredited people through material mutual aid, spiritual liberation praxis, heritage preservation, cosmovision, and place-based practices in the Chesapeake Bay area.

Presenter: Shannon Taggart

Description: Shannon Taggart first learned of Spiritualism as a teenager after a medium revealed details about her grandfather’s death that proved to be true. In 2001, she began photographing in the town where that message was received: Lily Dale, New York. Her project soon expanded to include séance rooms around the world in a quest to find and photograph ectoplasm – the elusive substance that is said to be both spiritual and material. In this illustrated presentation, Shannon will share stories and pictures from twenty years of photographing mediumship, explaining how two decades of investigation developed into the award-winning book Séance (Fulgur Press 2019, Atelier Éditions 2022). Spiritualism’s influence on art, technology, and politics, its relationship with celebrity spirits, and the religion’s intrinsic bond with photography will be part of the discussion.

Bio: Shannon Taggart is an artist and author based in St. Paul, MN. In a past life, she contributed to printed publications including TIME, Newsweek, New York Times Magazine, Discover, New York, Wall Street Journal and Reader’s Digest. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles, the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, the Robert Mann Gallery in New York, and the Gallery of Everything in London. Her photographs have been recognized by PDN, Nikon, Magnum Photos + Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, the International Photography Awards and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Her monograph, Séance (Fulgur Press 2019, Atelier Éditions 2022), was named one of TIME Magazine’s ‘Best Photobooks of 2019.’

Presenter: Lindsay DiCuirci

Description:Mediumship and the intimate practices of the spirit circle drew in some of the nineteenth-century's most prominent abolitionists in America. Spiritualism promised communication between the embodied and the disembodied through mediums and touted the continuous growth and "elevation" of the dead rather than, in the Christian tradition, the finality of judgment. This talk explores the beliefs, language and community practices that fused an interracial circle of spiritualists at 36 Sophia Street, the home of Isaac and Amy Post in Rochester, NY. It focuses on Isaac Post’s 1852 collection of spirit letters, Voices from the Spirit World, Being Communications from Many Spirits, and on Amy's extensive correspondence with Boston-based Black abolitionist, historian and editor William Cooper Nell. Hearing from dead luminaries from George Washington to Napoleon Bonaparte, Post recorded a chorus of regret and expiation, requiring a radical rethinking of the people and accomplishments that merit enshrinement in public memory and space. Post’s iconoclasm was in conversation with Nell’s own historiographic efforts to commemorate and center Black history in mid-century Boston, an effort informed by the conviction that those lionized while "in the body" were not guaranteed glory in the celestial sphere.

Presenter: Kate Drabinski

The logics of crime and punishment are so deeply embedded for most of us that it is hard to think of any alternatives. Carceral logics shape everything from the attendance and late policies on our syllabi to our responses to fear and harm. How do we learn to imagine otherwise? In this presentation Dr. Kate Drabinski will share strategies from her teaching about prisons, prison abolition, and social movements that build toward that horizon. She will also raise questions about how we might start building anti-carceral logics into our classes to nurture this work on a wider scale.

Bio: Dr. Kate Drabinski is Principal Lecturer of Gender, Women's, + Sexuality Studies and Director of the WILL+ Program at UMBC. Her teaching and research interests include transgender studies, histories and theories of social change, and intersectional histories in Baltimore City. She has been teaching and learning about abolition for a very long time, and she's still always learning new things.

Presenter: Glennor Shirley, Retired Prison Librarian

We will discuss the alarmingly high rate of incarceration in the United States and in Maryland, as well as racial discrimination resulting in incarceration. We’ll dive into how prison librarians encourage inmates to use their libraries in preparation for successful re-entry.

Bio:Born in Jamaica and immigrating to the United States in 1984, Glennor Shirley’s love of libraries knows no borders. After earning her MLIS from the University of Maryland, College Park, Glennor started working in public libraries. She took an evening job working with those who were arrested and housed before being transferred to prison, based on the degree of crime committed. Her works in prisons includes being the Coordinator of Correctional Education Libraries via the Maryland State Department of Education, where she was responsible for governance of all aspects of library services for 19 Maryland State prisons.

Presenter: Kevin Muhitch, UMBC Alum, Morgan, Angel & Associates, Research Associate

This talk examines community struggles against the expansion of Maryland’s prison system in the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, it illustrates how an eclectic group of activists in Baltimore helped to make prison projects in the city untenable. While state actors pursued several sites in Baltimore, such as docking a “prison ship” in the Baltimore harbor, city residents successfully organized to prevent them from being built. By the 1980s, state officials resumed prison expansion efforts in rural Somerset County, where they found a political system more willing to accept the ramifications of mass incarceration. In tracing the politics of prison siting, this talk illustrates the contested ways urban activism, and the decisions of state actors, shaped the geography of mass incarceration.

Bio: Kevin Muhitch received his M.A. in history from UMBC in 2020, where his research examined mass incarceration in Maryland by tracing debates over prison siting in the late-twentieth century. He formerly served as a Research Fellow at the Sentencing Project, where he focused on voting rights, extreme sentencing, and racial disparities in the U.S. criminal legal system. He also worked as a Research Assistant on Dr. G. Derek Musgrove’s historical mapping project “Black Power in Washington, D.C.” Currently, he serves as a Research Associate at Morgan, Angel & Associates in Washington, D.C, where he primarily conducts historical research for litigation involving Superfund sites.

Presenter: Elaine MacDougall (Grad student)

During June of 2022, I took part in Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program Training, which is a “National pedagogical project offering semester-long, college-level classes behind bars to groups of students” (Davis, 2011, p. 204). From its original model as a program for criminal justice majors, the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program has evolved to include courses across many disciplines, including creative writing and literature courses. This program gives incarcerated students a connection to the outside world and an opportunity to have a voice in a system which historically has not listened. This talk will focus on things I learned from the training as I work towards designing my own curriculum for an empowering writing program and/or college level course geared towards the needs of incarcerated women.

Bio: Elaine MacDougall is a Lecturer in the English department, Assistant Director of the Writing Center, and Coordinator of the Writing Fellows Program at UMBC. She is currently working towards her doctoral degree in the Language, Literacy, and Culture Program at UMBC. Elaine's current research interests include incarcerated women and identity, as well as anti-racist practices and linguistic justice in college writing centers. She also teaches and practices yoga and mindfulness.

Presenter: Yanet Amanuel, ACLU, Director of Public Policy

The discussion will focus on the intersection of the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and police reform. I will explain how as more states begin to legalize marijuana in an effort to" end the war on drugs," what ends up happening is there are more racial disparities in arrests than prior to decriminalization and legalization. Mainly due to the failure to expand redress efforts to "violent offenses" and reform police practices (and the failure to achieve community control of policing). I will share examples of the work and legislation we are working on in Maryland to address these issues and the challenges we continue to face.

Bio: Yanet Amanuel is the director of public policy at the ACLU of Maryland. Yanet has served as public policy advocate and interim public policy director twice before becoming the director. Yanet Amanuel began her advocacy career as a student at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she received her B.A. in Sociology. She continued to pursue her passion for advocacy and organizing in several roles, including as Chief of Staff for a Prince George’s County delegate, Region 7 (Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia) Adult Representative on the NAACP National Youth Works Committee, Young Adult Chair of the Prince George’s County NAACP and as a Policy Advocate at Job Opportunities Task Force. Most recently, ACLU-MD Policy Advocate, Yanet co-led the Maryland Coalition for Justice and Police Accountability and led the ACLU’s legislative advocacy efforts to repeal the Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights, reform the Maryland Public Information Act to allow public disclosure of police misconduct records, and remove the Governor from the parole process for Marylanders serving life with parole sentences.

Presenter: Lawrence Grandpre, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, Director of Research

2021 had the highest rate of death by overdose in American history, with over 100,000 Americans dead. In opposition to the "Just Say No" ideology of the 80's and 90's - harm reduction rejects abstinence-only dogma and promotes "any positive change" toward more healthy and more controlled substance use. Yet in the Black community, which has faced decades of addiction struggle - some have raised issues with harm reduction apparently "libertarian" and "permissive" attitude toward drug use. This talk focuses on the role of the war on drug/ drug criminalization in Maryland in hollowing out the capacity of communities to support healthy functioning. Specifically, this talk will discuss how patterns of drug war incarceration hinder the production of social capital in targeted communities necessary to build institutions. This is why community-centered reparations are an essential component to drug decriminalization.

Bio: Lawrence Grandpre is Director of Research for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. His focuses include drug policy, criminal justice, police accountability, and community-based economic/educational development. He is the co-author of “The Black Book” and his work has been featured in The Guardian, The Baltimore Sun, Time Magazine and Black Agenda Report. He is also the co-host of the In Search of Black Power Podcast.

Presenter: Michael Casiano, UMBC

In this talk, Mike Casiano will provide an overview of how policing shaped urban governance in Baltimore during the post-Civil War Era. Specifically, he will focus on the institutions that emerged, including the City Jail, various police bureaus, and reform groups, to discuss how nineteenth century investments in reframing local governance resulted in the bureaucratized structures of the twentieth century that continue to define city functions. He will also foreground the various archival sources he has used to narrate this history from the perspective of everyday people's lived experiences.

Bio: Mike Casiano is an assistant professor of American Studies and a core faculty member in the Public Humanities Minor. He is completing his book manuscript, which is entitled Let Us Alone: Race and Police Power in Baltimore, 1857-1929. This talk draws on the book's key sources and arguments.

Presenter: Betsy Fox Tolentino, Deputy Secretary/ Community Operations/ Department of Juvenile

Over the past decade many strategies have been implemented resulting in more than an 80% reduction in juvenile incarceration. Participants will explore how alternatives to detention, agency policies and practices, the COVID19 pandemic, and Maryland’s newest juvenile justice reform laws impact how young people experience our state juvenile justice system. Moreover, the presentation will focus on applying a race equity lens to reform, advocacy and essential partnerships to increase system fairness and effectiveness.

Bio: A graduate of Southern Oregon University and Widener University School of Law, Tolentino's career has focused extensively on criminal and juvenile justice advocacy, and policy development aimed at improving and building systems to meet the diverse needs of our communities. Tolentino's experience includes representing and advocating for criminal defendants and children in Maryland's foster care and juvenile justice systems before trial courts, the Maryland General Assembly, and system stakeholders. Betsy most recently served as the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services’ Deputy Secretary of Community Operations where she focused on: changing the way young people, families, and stakeholders experience justice system interventions; mitigating racial disparities and developing a fair and equitable approach to reform; and empowering opportunities for shared innovation with partners to become a catalyst for change. In addition to her current role as the Managing Director of the Roca Impact Institute, Betsy volunteers with community based organizations, serves on the Mentor MD/DC Board of Directors, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Presenter: Nathaniel R. Balis, Director Juvenile Justice Strategy Group, The Annie E. Casey Foundation

Over the last quarter century, America’s juvenile justice system has changed in profound ways. While politicians in the 1990s fretted about the since-debunked myth of the “juvenile super-predator” and responded with harsher laws for kids in virtually every state in the country, youth crime had already started its steady and sometimes sharp decline. Prior to the pandemic, youth arrests and youth confinement had plummeted, all while research offered practitioners and policymakers a wealth of information about the adolescent brain and what works in supporting young people, and yet racial disparities only got worse, with Black youth bearing the brunt of the system’s punitive practices. In the early months of the pandemic, youth confinement dropped much further, hinting at a more permanent shift in the size and scope of the juvenile justice system, but that has changed swiftly over the last year, and racial disparities are much worse today than they were prior to Covid-19 and the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. So it begs the question going forward: can we achieve a much-needed new normal in youth justice or are we backsliding to the old status quo?

Bio: Nate Balis is the director of the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. He leads the JDAI® network of juvenile justice practitioners in 40 states and over 300 counties that is working to build a better and more equitable youth justice system. Through his leadership, the Foundation has launched several youth justice projects and initiatives, including transforming juvenile probation, ending the youth prison model and JDAIconnect, an online community that accelerates youth justice reform across and beyond the JDAI network through peer-to-peer learning, training and resources. Maryland’s governor appointed Nate to the state’s Juvenile Justice Reform Council for a two-year term in 2019. Prior to his time at Casey, he was research manager for Washington, D.C.’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. A native of Maryland, Nate earned a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s degree from Franklin & Marshall College.

Presenter: Dr. Denise Meringolo (UMBC Associate Professor of History and Director of Public History)

Historic sites, museums, archives, and monuments are neither neutral nor objective. Many were established to strengthen tradition, reinforce the cultural authority of elites, and inhibit change. Today, these sites have become the focal point of protest, symbols in a larger fight for inclusiveness and equality. In this talk, Dr. Denise Meringolo identifies different, less well-documented forms of public history practice, drawing attention to individuals who understood collecting, preserving, analyzing, and interpreting the past as entirely compatible with - even necessary for—productive political discourse, and embraced the potential of their work to promote social justice.

Presenter: Lawrence Grandpre (Director of Research for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle)

Historical analysis of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements reveals that attempts to co-opt social justice movements have often been couched as attempts to do "community reinvestment". Despite this, many "leftist" have celebrated recent federal and state investments into "underserved communities", often without critically interrogating the institutional imperatives and political infrastructures behind these policies. Leader of a Beautiful Struggle Director of Research Lawrence Grandpre will analyze recent federal and state social justice interventions, arguing that, while claiming to be radical, many have served to further center decision-making power within elites institutions that adopt top-down, technocratic methodologies on how to engage Black and Brown communities, thus further disempowering the communities they claim to support. Conversely, an analysis of Baltimore's federal poverty programs and minority contracting investments in the 60s, 70s, and 80s reveal paths to an alternative vision on how to conceptualize policy approaches to community empowerment, ones that can harness the history and culture of oppressed communities to empower communities to serve as their own saviors.

Presenter: Chuck D’Adamo (Co-editor of the Alternative Press Index)

Every social movement of radical action requires a linked movement of radical ideas. The New Left of the 1960s and 1970s developed a radical culture in journalism and academic research which challenged mainstream practices. The Alternative Press Index was founded in 1969 to document these cultural practices. This talk will discuss aspects of this development through some examples of the new periodicals which originated during this time. There will be some focus on an example of class analysis which attempts to clarify social relationships relevant for strategic practice. (The Albin O. Kuhn Library archives the periodicals of the API).

Presenter: Dr. Nancy Kusmaul (UMBC Associate Professor of Social Work), with UMBC students Kayla Brooks and Deysi Chitic-Amaya

The language used inside and outside social justice movements speaks volumes about what people believe the movement to be about. Yet often even those within a movement do not always agree on the terms. In this presentation, students Deysi Chitic-Amaya and Kayla Brooks, along with Faculty Advisor Dr. Nancy Kusmaul will discuss the lessons learned while collecting oral histories for From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore during co-lab 2021. More information on this co-lab project will be available on the Center for Social Science Scholarship’s new podcast series, available sometime during the 2021-2022 academic year.

Presenter: Dr. Kate Drabinski (UMBC Principal Lecturer of Gender and Women’s Studies and Director of WILL+ ), with UMBC students Sarah Nove and Gabe Brunal

What does "radical" mean in our classrooms? How do we teach about radicalism, particularly when the concept itself can be so politically divisive? Building on examples from her teaching about Baltimore's radical queer and feminist movements, Kate Drabinski will share strategies for teaching, learning, and thinking radically in classes, and how this work can move beyond the boundaries of UMBC.

Presenter: Dr. Fred Pincus (UMBC Emeritus Professor of Sociology)

UMBC students, faculty and staff participated in a wide range of radical social movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like other students across the country, protests against the Vietnam War and systemic racism were common. Demands for more on-campus student decision-making power were also important including administration’s censorship of a literary magazine, the hiring and firing of faculty and the development of a Black Studies program. This resulted in demonstrations, sit-ins and student strikes. Dr. Pincus will also report on a small, where-are-they-now study of former activists.