Project Proposal: Access Intimacy in Buffalo’s East and West Side Neighborhoods

Co-Principal Investigators
    —Devonya Havis, PhD, UB Comparative Literature & Global Gender and Sexuality Studies
   —Andrea J. Pitts, PhD, UB Comparative Literature
    —Justin Read, PhD, UB Romance Languages 

Proposal Narrative
This proposal seeks to develop a pilot project to conduct oral history interviews with Black and Latinx community members in Buffalo, NY who are either receiving care or providing care within communities of color in the East Side and West Side neighborhoods of the city. A central focus of this pilot project will be affirming relations of “access intimacy” among community members who are interviewers and interviewees participating within the Communities of Care Project (hereafter referred to as “CoC Project”). Disability justice writer, educator and trainer Mia Mingus describes “access intimacy” in the following manner:

"Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs ... Sometimes it can happen with complete strangers, disabled or not, or sometimes it can be built over years. It could also be the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met. It is not dependent on someone having a political understanding of disability, ableism or access."*

Following Mingus’ description, this proposal seeks to affirm existing relationships among community members in the East Side and West Side neighborhoods of Buffalo with the goal of conducting oral history interviews that reflect or rely on forms of access intimacy. Access intimacy, as Mingus describes, builds on shared lived experiences, including experiences of disability, systemic ableism, patterns of racialization, systemic racism, gender relations, sexuality, heteronormativity, class conditions, conditions of scarcity, trauma, joy, language and communication, and other forms of shared experience. As such, we seek resources from the CoC Project to facilitate conversations and deepen relations of access intimacy among Black and Latinx interviewers and interviewees in the East and West Side neighborhoods of Buffalo to discuss how care shapes their lives. 

In particular, the proposal seeks funding to develop group sessions and community events at site-specific locations in the East and West Side neighborhoods that will seek out participants for the CoC Project with the aim of conducting at least 5-6 oral history interview sessions (with perhaps as many participants, although some participants may choose to participate in more than 1 interview session). Deepening and affirming access intimacy among Black and Latinx interviewers and interviewees in the CoC Project will also help facilitate, we hope, the sharing of stories in the oral history interviews that speak to the needs, desires, and values of Buffalo’s East and West Side communities. Locations/organizations for outreach include the following, which build on our already existing relationships in the city: the Belle Center, Frank E. Merriweather, Jr. Branch Library, Isaias Gonzalez-Soto Branch Library, Hamlin Park Community & Taxpayers Association, the Moot Center, Crane Library Branch, Harvest House, La Casa de los Taínos, Gloria J. Parks Community Community Center, Healthy Start, Delavan-Grider Community Center, Marks Homecare, the Locust Street Neighborhood Art Center, the Agustin “Pucho” Olivencia Community Center, Immersion East Side, PUSH Buffalo, Voice Buffalo, and the Partnership for the Public Good.

The detailed budget addresses the funding and resource allocation for the proposal, including the costs of translation for Spanish-language interviews.

Anticipated Project Outcomes
Oral history interviews completed: 5-6 recorded sessions
Transcripts: 5-6 transcripts
Spanish-English Translations: 3 English-language translations of transcripts

Timeline for Completion of the Work
●  Summer 2024: Following the hiring of the CoC Project Community Liaison, the Co-PIs will begin coordinating 5-6 interviews by hosting local events and participating in events hosted by community partners to facilitate interviewer-interviewee relationships.
●  Fall 2024 and Spring 2025: Facilitate interviews
●  Spring 2025: Hire a graduate student or community member with linguistic and cultural competency to review AI-generated transcribed Spanish-language interviews
●  Summer 2025: Hire a graduate student or community member with linguistic and cultural competency to translate Spanish-language transcripts to English (or to review AI-generated translations) 

* Mia Mingus, “Access Intimacy: The Missing Link,” Leaving Evidence Blog, May 5, 2011.

From Burnout to Renewal: Centering Healing and Wellbeing in Post-Pandemic Education through a Heart-Based Contemplative Approach

PI: Jinting Wu

Associate Professor, Educational Culture, Policy, and Society
Department of Educational Leadership and Policy
Affiliate | Center for Disability Studies | Gender Institute | Asia Research Institute University at Buffalo
432 Baldy Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260
Tel: 716-645-1081
Email: jintingw@buffalo.edu 

Histories of Care and Community: Restor(y)ing Residential Deaf and Blind Schools in the Jim Crow South

Jenifer L. Barclay, Department of History

            In Sounds Like Home, a rare memoir by a Black deaf southerner, Mary Herring Wright describes her childhood hearing loss and the grief she felt as a twelve-year-old leaving her hometown to attend the residential North Carolina School for the “Colored” Deaf and Blind in Raleigh. In denial about the looming start of school, Wright spent the summer of 1935 ignoring the letter and train ticket that came from Raleigh and the new clothes and suitcase her parents bought her. On the day of her departure, she ignored the reason her mother cooked and packed a feast of her favorite foods. When she dressed in a new outfit and said goodbye to her brothers, sister, and beloved dog, Queen, however, the tears began to flow. As her parents drove her to the train station, Wright “hurt and ached all over” watching her home fade from sight and the neighbors wave goodbye.^[1] At the station, she saw other children waiting to leave – her cousin, Norman, and his friend, Catherine, who were both blind, and an older girl, Margie, who was deaf. The constellation of people she recalled from that day attests to the deep significance of community and its relationship to care, both for Black southerners and disabled people in pre-Civil Rights era America.   

After the train departed for Raleigh, more children who knew Wright’s anguish all too well boarded at stops along the way. Comprising another community of care that grew larger as the school grew nearer, they comforted her as they took their seats in the segregated car reserved for them because they were both disabled and Black. They patted her shoulder, held her hand, made her laugh, and promised she would love the school. Wright’s heartache subsided, then welled again when she smelled the food her mother had sent. Her first weeks and months at the residential school repeated this roller coaster of emotions and memories, suspended between separate but overlapping communities. Homesickness ebbed and flowed, triggered by warm, sunny days that reminded her of playing outside with her siblings and her dog, then eased by the new community she found herself in that understood how deafness and blackness shaped her life. Wright’s classmates, teachers, and the matron of the deaf girls’ dormitory, Mrs. Mallette, consoled and cared for her as she navigated this painful process.

Wright’s discussion of her journey from home to residential school is only a single chapter of her memoir, yet it illuminates a range of individuals and a geography of care that stretched from the rural town of Iron Mine to the school’s urban campus in Raleigh a hundred miles away. Despite the importance of such first-hand accounts for shedding light on the dynamics of community, care, and survival for multiply-marginalized students in residential schools, very few exist. Of them, almost all focus on the lives of Black deaf students and ignore blind students.^[2] In this project, I hope to add critical narratives to this limited archive by conducting and recording oral and signed history interviews with former students and those in their family and community networks of support. A project of both restoring and re-storying, this work will add new dimensions to the history of blind and deaf education in the U.S. by contextualizing it within African American history and thinking expansively and historically about meanings and practices of “care,” particularly as they were shaped by the intersecting forces of race, gender, disability, class, and place.^[3]   

To summarize and clarify the outcomes of this project, I will conduct and record twenty interviews, each two hours in length, about the experiences of former students, their family members, and faculty/staff related to schools for blind and deaf students in the Jim Crow south. I hope to interview people who attended school in Washington, DC or Overlea, Maryland during and immediately after segregation, but this may change depending on the availability of participants. Video and audio recording will take place either in-person at Gallaudet’s Schuchman Center for Documentary History or over Zoom. Interviews with deaf former students will include Certified Deaf Interpreters (CDIs) familiar with Black American Sign Language (BASL). I will strive to gather an equal number of interviews with deaf and blind former students as well as siblings, friends, or remaining faculty/staff who can speak to networks of care within and beyond the schools themselves. Collectively, the interviews will document topics such as how students defined and understood “care,” how they cared for one another, what other caregivers they relied on (parents, siblings, neighbors, teachers, staff, church members), how they navigated tensions and overlap between communities of care at home and school, and times they lacked or faced barriers to care.

(The proposed timeline and budget included in proposal.)

            With the support of a $15,000 seed grant, I expect to produce video and/or audio recordings of twenty interviews by June 2025 that are professionally edited and include English transcriptions. These interviews will contribute to both the UB Communities of Care oral/signed history archive and my own research. They will serve as critical primary sources for my book project, Between Two Worlds: A Black Disability History of American Education from Emancipation to Integration, and essential experience to strengthen my pursuit of external funding from organizations like the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Spencer Foundation. Most importantly, however, the interviews will record the lived experiences of a generation of deaf and blind students of color who attended segregated residential schools in their youth before the chance to do so is lost. In addition to providing much-needed insights into the historical intersection of racism and ableism in American education, these histories teach us about the “poetics of survival” that emerge from this oppressive nexus and produce “vast networks of support” through which Black disabled lives “are enriched, enabled, and made possible.”[4]

[1] Mary Herring Wright, Sounds Like Home (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, orig. 1999, rpt. 2019), 83.

[2] For interviews with deaf former students, see Glenn B. Anderson, Still I Rise!: The Enduring Legacy of Black Deaf Arkansans Before and After Integration (Little Rock: Arkansas Association of the Deaf, Inc., 2006); Carolyn McCaskill, Ceil Lucas, Robert Bayley, and Joseph Hill, The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2011); and G. Jasper Conner, “Blind and Deaf Together: Cross-Disability Community at Virginia’s Residential School for Black Disabled Youth,” Disability Studies Quarterly 43 No. 1 (2023).

[3] African scholar Chinua Achebe suggested that “re-storying” is a form of resistance to a single story, when marginalized people re-tell dominant historical narratives from their perspective. It is a particularly apt term relative to Deaf history since many deaf people prefer the term “narrative” (signed “story”) over “oral” history. For decades, a campaign of oralism suppressed signed language and forced deaf people to speak so the word “oral” carries “powerful, often painful, connotations” for many deaf adults. See Jean Bergey and Zilvinas Paludnevicius, “Interviews in American Sign Language,” Journal of Folklore and Education 6 (2019), 23.

[4] Jina B. Kim, “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique” Lateral, Issue 6.1 (Spring 2017).