Associate Professor Arijit Sen led the 2016 summer BLC field school in Washington Park. The Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School is a unique curricular offering at UWM’s Department of Architecture. It is a multi disciplinary setting where students, faculty, scholars, and community members explore ways to see and interpret the city by engaging multiple urban stakeholders in storytelling, ecological conservation, heritage preservation and civic engagement. From Grace Lee Boggs we learned that “We are the leaders we’ve been looking for,” and the job at the BLC field school is to empower such leaders. The specific objective of this project is to
1) encourage community-based learning and collaboration,
2) collect local histories of places of cultural relevance
3) gain skills that allow professionals to collect and analyze data
4) use the power of digital humanities to disseminate research data and
5) empower local communities by hearing/responding to those voices that are often not heard in urban and official discourses.