Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Roberts is a planning historian, theorist, public humanities scholar, place preservationist, and educator whose work centers on preserving historic Black settlements, also known as Freedom Colonies.Her work challenges racial biases that impede the recognition and preservation of these communities' cultural resources by addressing the recovery of marginal histories and the ampli cation of underrepresented voices, which are central concerns for Scholarly Editing.Dr. Roberts' The Texas Freedom Colonies Project directly engages in the recovery of the histories of Black settlements, which were often marginalized and made invisible in public records.The project's work of ethically recording and safeguarding storiesincluding oral histories-and materials associated with freedom colonies directly contributes to uncovering and sustaining the cultural record.Dr. Roberts' revolutionary interactive The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas & Study serves as a repository for accessing and disseminating information on historical Black settlements integrating spatial, ethnographic, and archival data in a public-facing database and map.Readers will be especially interested in Dr. Roberts' "place preservation" framework, which embodies the spirit of community recovery that the journal encourages.Her participatory approach actively partners future planners, preservationists, scholars, and community-based researchers with descendant communities to prevent the erasure of their cultural properties and to develop resilience strategies.Additionally, The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas & Study, a "prototype for a future portal" for historical Black settlement data, is a digital humanities platform that advances the recovery of underrepresented stories.Dr. Roberts' ground-breaking scholarship and digital humanities work have garnered several distinguished appointments and accolades, including her appointment as the Visiting Scholar at Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.Dr. Roberts' forthcoming book on Black planning and preservation practices, Never Sell the Land, has been accepted for publication by The University of Texas Press.
Source: Scholarly Editing
DOI: 10.55520/smzam2sd
Author: Cheyenne Symonette
Institution: Michigan State University
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4411164345