Episode 4: The Lived Experience in Baltimore with Deysi Chitic-Amaya, Lorra Toler, and Kayla Brooks: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

Episode 4: The Lived Experience in Baltimore with Deysi Chitic-Amaya, Lorra Toler, and Kayla Brooks

Amy Barnes16min

Dr. Ian Anson

00:07

Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, associate professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research that they've been performing in recent times. Quantitative, qualitative, applied empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences we bring the best of UMBC social science community to you.

Dr. Ian Anson

00:42

This week, we're profiling a really cool project that was recently completed by a trio of UMBC undergrads. In fact, these students made a podcast which makes this episode a kind of podcast in a podcast or a meta podcast, which is probably the future of audio. I digress. The UMBC School of Social Work is a fantastic place. The school offers a degree for undergraduate students with the hope that they will go on to advanced study at the University of Maryland School of Social Work or other places, eventually to careers in macro and micro level social work. Social workers do vitally important things in our communities. They bolster the people who live there in ways big and small. If you didn't know, March is, National Social Work Month, so mark your calendars for the spring. You'll want to thank the social workers you know for all their hard work.

Dr. Ian Anson

01:35

But what pray tell is a CoLab you might be asking? Well, I'm excited to talk with you about this because I actually didn't know about this program until Dr. Kusmaul introduced it to me. CoLab is a four-week, paid summer narrative-based research internship for undergraduate UMBC students. And according to the copy I have here, in the program, participants are supposed to create an effective narrative about UMBC's campus, communities, and lives in an interdisciplinary team. The program is open to all majors across campus, which means that this is an excellent opportunity for students in STEM fields to learn to tell effective stories and for students in social science and humanities fields to gain research and technical skills. You know, kind of like when the Power Rangers would form a bigger, more powerful robot. That's CoLab. Of course, that's not in the copy. But I like to imagine CoLab as a kind of social science Megazord, if you will. Oh, and here's the kicker. Participants in this program received a $3,000 stipend and a scholarship for a three-credit internship course. Getting paid to do cool social science research? That's a pretty good deal in my book. You know, I'm pretty sure the Power Rangers did their thing entirely pro bono, didn't they, so this is even better.

Dr. Ian Anson

02:51

This particular CoLab project led by Dr. Kusmaul was called "From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience of Baltimore." The project was designed to tell the story of racial justice activism in Baltimore, drawing on existing data from the Maryland Historical Society, and new data gathered from a series of extended interviews with civil rights leaders that the students themselves performed. The students who worked on the project are Deysi Chitic-Amaya, Kayla Brooks, and Laura Toler. All three of these students had a lot to say about their experience with the project in their interview. So let's jump right in and learn a little more about the researchers, the research, and the biggest takeaways from the CoLab learning experience.

Deysi Chitic-Amaya

03:41

With oral histories, it's a much more intimate experience. And so we really wanted to bring that to the listener and give them a different perspective on both of these movements.

Kayla Brooks

03:55

Yeah, and like going off of what Deysi was saying, I think the intimacy behind like the interviews that we conducted for our oral histories, and the types of things that we asked our interviewees and their responses, it's very much individualized. Even though, like the broader topic of our project is about From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter. There's a whole bunch of things that the people talk about in their interviews that are very individualized, and it serves as a kind of background context for the work that they're doing currently. And I think getting that type of individualized, unique storytelling is very important. And I think it's one of the attractive qualities about oral history projects is being able to accomplish that.

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