Politics of space hinders research efforts and memory work, UB researcher says

The physical layout of a university is as much an emotional experience as it is an arrangement of buildings and, depending on the peculiar poetics of design, these spaces can uplift or deflate scholars and writers conducting research, according to UB faculty member Kari Winter.

Winter’s observations don’t necessarily spring from the discipline of architectural criticism. Instead, they speak to her expertise in historical memory and the history of the Atlantic World, including slave narratives and issues of resistance, dissent and revolution, which form the basis of a talk she will deliver as part of a two-day workshop being held Feb. 19-20 at the University of Utah.

The workshop, “Restoring the Routes of Memory,” will explore a historical call-and-response between the past and the present. Winter’s talk introduces the topic of slave narratives and the importance of doing research to reclaim the severed relationship between ancestors and descendants, part of the workshop’s general theme of helping participants discover narrative links to the past and allowing attendees to respond to the historical call of their ancestors.

John Edgar Wideman, Brown University professor of Africana studies and English, and the author of nearly 20 books including “Homewood Trilogy,” “Brothers and Keepers” and “Martinique,” is the event’s keynote speaker.

But how does someone’s experience within a physical space connect to restoring routes of memory?

For Winter, professor of transnational studies at UB, the bond between memory work and place is foundational. She finds an unsettling politics of space in many venues, notably at universities, where writers and scholars trying to make connections to the past conduct much of their research in a sometimes dissonant physical environment that doesn’t always support their efforts.

“Campus landscapes are physically and symbolically built in such a way that certain people are much more present than others,” says Winter, who also serves as director of UB’s Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender.

Using UB as an example that Winter says is neither egregious nor extraordinarily progressive in the way people are memorialized, she imagines a researcher — in this case, an African-American woman — walking around campus and considers what messages that person might be internalizing from the environment.

“Parts of Capen Hall are clearly marked male and white. It feels like a gauntlet with its portraits of mostly white men,” she says. “If you look at the interior design, it’s also marked as very Anglo-American and sedate. There’s nothing colorful, inviting or celebratory of a diverse world.”

Special Collections, which houses University Archives, the Poetry Collection and Rare & Special Books, is similarly adorned with monumental portraits of white males.

She also mentions the enormous mural in the Center for the Arts atrium.

“This mural has a very clear message that faculty, the history of faculty, the tradition of faculty and the reality of faculty is pretty much all white and all male.”

The experience is draining, she says, prompting questions like, “‘Can I do this?’ ‘Is there anything here for me?’ ‘Do I belong here?’”

“I’ve given a version of this talk in a few places and every time women and African-American scholars come up to me and say, ‘You’ve described my experience.’”

But if that same imagined researcher enters the North Campus the next day through the Student Union, Winter says she would be greeted by a vibrant chorus of world languages coming from a racially diverse, gender-plural student body.

The energy of the place is welcoming and exciting, and Winter says the doubtful questions are replaced by a sense of inclusion: “‘This is my place.’ ‘This is where I’ve always wanted to be.’ ‘This is why I love universities.’”

She says diversity is promoted and apparent in the student body, but absent in much of the physical space and the aesthetics of place.

“We participate in the old Western tradition of thought that is suspicious of color, trying to look as bland and sedate as possible,” Winter says. “This certain version of English taste pervades a lot of campuses.”

She says it all leads to the question: “To whom does the university belong?”

“I see the university as a gathering place for the world of ideas,” she says. “UB could emerge as a national leader in inventing campus designs that acknowledge and memorialize the true diversity of founders, builders, creators and scholars who enable research and teaching to thrive — from architects, engineers and plumbers to faculty, students and staff.

“Our physical space should be in sync with our quest for knowledge in which we constantly discover that it’s diversity, not conformity, that’s energizing.”