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

7:29PM Oct 4, 2021

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Deysi Chitic-Amaya

Kayla Brooks

Laura Toler

Keywords:

umbc

people

baltimore

community

colab

citizen oversight

project

police

students

social science

interviews

important

interviewees

ali

cities

research

hear

movements

listening

black lives matter

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of the racial and social justice issues that we see in the community today, didn't just happen overnight. Like these were problems that were established from the very creation of the city of Baltimore. And it's important for us to explore the history behind these issues, because they laid the foundation for a lot of structural issues that we see today.

I think some initial goals or plans were, basically to expand more on the ideas and themes between the civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter, like three specific ideas or themes to really focus the project on which were the importance of archival and history work, and how that's important to communites, documenting and journalism, in regards to movements and how that has changed over time, as well as just like direct action organizing, and what is currently being done with the present movement, and what we're learning from the past movement to move forward.

So for this project, I thought it was very interesting that we got like a place-based perspective of things that are happening within Baltimore. And I thought it was important about this project was to basically make people a little bit more accustomed to Baltimore history. I feel like some people might have like, their preconceived notions about whatever they think about the city, like a personalized experience.

Yeah, and just add on a little bit. Aside from like, actually learning, like learning the information between these movements, I think it's,there's a lot to be gained from the fact that we're hearing it from members of the community firsthand and in like their own perspectives, because, you know, certain events that take place like two people could have been through that experience, and can describe that experience to you in two completely different ways.

With our interviews, we interview people who were actually there, who were in Baltimore City, who experienced these, who were at the protests, and they really show you what they lived through, what they saw through their own eyes, not contorted, or whatever, by the media, just to create a narrative. Like all these other things that happened during the uprisings that weren't told before, through mainstream media, like dancing in the streets and community coming together during this like, horrible time for a greater cause. And I think that was like, really awesome to hear those stories, as well as like, hopefully, amplifying them, getting those stories spread so other people can hear them.

And I just think like, that's important when doing oral histories, because you want to hear what these people really think and not what they think that they should be saying to, I guess, appease a crowd.

I think what was also interesting about the interviews is that when you take into consideration everybody's like, individual, unique background, it like gives a lot of context into who they are as a person, and how that shapes the work that they're currently doing. But when we talk to like the organizing interviewees, it's like when you hear about all of the things that they have to say, and their ideas and what they want to do and the current projects that they're working on, then you realize that there are people out there who have legitimate ideas, and they're working consistently in order to make them a reality. And when you listen to what they have to say, then you realize that there are actually people who are out here doing it, and they have the capability to actually enforce it.

I remember them talking... the people we're interviewing, talking about how, you know, this uprising was just kind of waiting to happen after many years of dealing with like police brutalities, and, you know, facing these injustices for so long. And, you know, not only like the bad things that were portrayed in the media, but a lot of the good things that came out of that experience, like how the communities came together to rebuild. How like, you know, a lot more people were able to have these like important conversations.

When you're creating a product that's also going to be released to the public and other people are going to hear. I think there's also intimidation in that. Should I do something that I want to hear or something that other people want to hear? Or like what do I think other people want to hear? And there's just like, all these like, complexities and these questions,

Depending on who you get together for the project. It's gonna, people are gonna have their own specific take on it. So I think having people from like different disciplines really help diversify our end product. And I think it made it stronger ultimately.

It was important that the people creating it also came from different backgrounds. Because we know we all have like our own experiences. And I think that also like shapes what was to gain from the process and like, what type of questions we were asking, and, you know, the goals we really wanted to achieve with the project.

By localizing them and focusing on the Baltimore area, and like Baltimore individuals and community leaders and social organizers. When you listen to these Baltimoreans, talking about their experience, and what they went through, hopefully, that will make people see the movements differently, make them more real. So I think that's definitely one of the big takeaways that I hope audience members get when they listen to this collection.

I think the biggest thing that I want the audience members to takeaway from listening to the collection is how like, impactful and powerful storytelling can be for education. Because I think that a lot of people are under like, this misconception that the only way that you can learn something valuable is if it comes through like some certified, distinguished, elite like academic lens. But that doesn't always have to be the case. And I feel like if you just talk to people who are just like ordinary in your community, a lot of their own personal experiences that they have to share, a lot of stories that help inform like the larger conversations that we're having a large scale.

I hope the people listening to this, I hope they understand like how much these racial and social and injustices are really like a structural issue. Because like from the Civil Rights Movement, like to today with the Black Lives Matter Movement, it's been like, so long, and it's like, we're still seeing a lot of the same issues in this country. I think that, you know, people like look at Baltimore, and they have like a certain, maybe bias to the community and a lot of things that happen in the community. But like, it's important to really dive into why, you know, things are the way it is because it didn't like just come from nowhere.

This has been the summer 2021 Co-Lab. team for "From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore." And yeah, please check out our collection on the UMBC Library's special digital collection. There might be a link in this podcast, I don't know. Definitely worth checking out and listening to and once you're done listening to maybe look more in depth in our interviewees because they are very interesting and have a lot to say and are doing a lot of awesome work. So, yeah, I believe that's it for us.

Campus Connection (x6)

It's time for a regular segment. This is Campus Connections, a part of the podcast where we connect today's featured research to other work in the social sciences on you UMBC's campus. Today's connection, the work of Dr. Mir Usman Ali of the UMBC School of Public Policy. Dr. Usman Ali's research has focused on a single unifying theme, trying to understand how we can foster institutional change that enhances social equity. In a recent study with Dr. Sean Nicholson-Crotty of Indiana University, which just happens to be my alma mater too, Dr. Usman Ali explores a paradox in policing behavior. Some existing research shows that citizen oversight of police, as we might expect, leads to improved policing performance, that is police do a better job at serving the community's needs. But other studies show that citizen oversight can sometimes damage this link, making police unwilling to proactively engage in the community. Apparently this kind of thing isn't an isolated conundrum for social sciences. In fact, there appear to be trade offs between accountability and oversight in all kinds of realms of public management. Dr. Usman Ali and Dr. Nicholson-Crotty specifically want to know if civilian oversight agencies (COAs) reduced or increased police performance. To do this, they sent a survey to these COAs in 76 US cities, which is an incredible data collection effort, truly. They were able to determine the strength, budgets, capacities, and other details of each COA using this method. By matching these details to policing outcomes in the cities in question, they found out that in cities where COAs had broad scope of citizen oversight, policing was improved. But when COAs had limited authority and narrow oversight, their presence actually worsened policing. These findings really give us a lot to think about, especially in light of the conversation we just heard. Hopefully Dr. Usman Ali's research will help us sort out more of these puzzles in the near future. That's all for today. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our associate director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno. And our production intern is Jefferson Rivas. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland. Find out more about CS3 at socialsciences.umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent UMBC events. Until next time, keep questioning.