2025-06-28 –, Mezzanine B
This roundtable engages with the conference theme "Protest, Prohibition, and Pugilism: Louisville and the World" by examining how immersive educational experiences function as forms of witness and protest against racial injustice. Just as Louisville became a focal point for global demonstrations against racialized state violence following Breonna Taylor's killing, our immersive programs place students at sites where historical traumas and resistance occurred.
Our proposed discussion brings together four educators who lead immersive travel programs that engage students with histories of racial injustice and resistance. Specifically, we will discuss how immersive travel programs enable students to engage with contested histories and ongoing legacies of racial capitalism, colonialism, and resistance. Through the Parker Dailey Seminar for Racial Reconciliation in Charleston and the service-immersion program at St. Labre Catholic Indian School in Montana, students confront the physical landscapes where slavery, Indigenous displacement, and resistance occurred while complicating students' understanding of memory, protest, and their own positionality. Drawing connections to Louisville's own history of racial protest and the global dimensions of resistance to racialized state violence, we seek to start conversations about the possibility—and, we would argue, necessity—of using in-situ education about history to confront the violent inheritances that still structure our present politics. By physically placing students in these contested spaces, immersive education helps them understand protest not as an isolated phenomenon but as part of global historical patterns of resistance to racial oppression.
Contributors will examine how immersion experiences reveal connections between historical injustices and contemporary inequities, how place-based education creates encounters with memory that challenge simplistic narratives, the tensions between students' expectations of "protest-worthy" histories and the complexities they encounter, and the pedagogical approaches that position students as witnesses rather than saviors.
Slavery, Violence, Native American, Education, Travel, Atlantic World, African, Culture
Timothy Fritz is an associate professor and chair of the history department at Mount St. Mary’s University. He is a historian of race and religion in the Atlantic World whose work examines the memory of resistance to slavery in the eighteenth-century American South.
Dr. Michelle Wick Patterson is an assistant professor of History at Mount St. Mary’s University. Her scholarship examines cross-cultural interactions between Native Americans and non-Indians in the early 20th century. She teaches courses in Native American and US Women’s History. Additionally, she engages in service-learning and study abroad programs at the Mount.
Lyndsey Saunders is a doctoral student of Sociology at UMass Amherst. Her research explores modern-day outcomes of education and neighborhood disenfranchisement perpetuated over time by universities in historically redlined cities. Her current work focuses specifically on Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to her research, she also teaches undergraduate Statistics.
Dr. Benjamin Firgens is an assistant professor of communication at Mount St. Mary's University. He studies how debates over technology allow publics to imagine and contest their futures and he explores past developments in the social construction of technology to make sense of current trends in digital culture.