Heritage Organizations in Rochester, NY
Click on the icons above to view a powerpoint presentation given at the April 2005 annual meeting of the national Society for Applied Anthropology, also a report submitted to three community organizations in June 2005. The co-authors on these projects were my students and are alumni of Empire State College. Research collaboration with students is an important part of my mentoring.
Although places and their uses change rapidly, many organizations work to preserve and conserve material culture and "nature," which usually means ecological and environmental life and material in relationship with humans. People socially construct these relationships to be ideally essential or stable, but often they are not. My interest in this human activity centers on the communication, aesthetics, and rhetoric that surround desires and decisions about such relationships. I have been involved in study projects with three Rochester based organizations that work to educate, preserve, and influence decisions about use of built structures and property (Landmark Society), traditional "commons" activity and places (Rochester Public Market), and wildlife (Braddock Bay Raptor Research).
Some of the text, images, and artifacts of these organizations appear in the photographs in poster form below. These images were presented at the Genesee Valley Center Festival of Ideas in June, 2005. The artifacts give some of the flavor of the organizations' local presence in Rochester, NY. I am currently offering more students the chance to become involved with these and other organizations' activities as part of credit bearing studies in a variety of topics: Civic Engagement and Service Learning in Cultural Preservation (also Qualitative Observation and Documentation).
