ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I offer a reflection of my participation as applied ethnographer during a two-year artist residency in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood of North Philadelphia. John Coltrane once lived in the neighborhood, as did Nina Simone. Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazer once trained on its wooded trails. This history is largely unknown outside of the neighborhood. Now under pressure from redevelopment efforts, residents have long lived with the fallout of deindustrialization, redlining, and criminalization. During this residency, I collaborated with an artist collective, local non-profits, and residents to document local histories and assets while addressing long-term histories of racialized disinvestment. To do so, we transformed an underutilized historic house into a public platform for experiments in civic engagement. I reflect on the ways that sensory ethnographic methods contributed to these efforts, including multimodal installations of archival photographs, youth-made videos, and “sound baths” comprised of audio clips from oral history interviews. These sensory experiments brought Strawberry Mansion’s rich legacy to the fore while documenting the structural conditions and policies that have conspired to create hardship for residents. In particular, I consider how the polyvocality of these multimodal representations moved the project from documenting local assets to challenging the institutional racism and knowledge extraction often embedded in civic engagement projects, offering methodological considerations for a more equitable development process.
