Podcast: The Monumental Project
By Monuments Toolkit
By Monuments Toolkit
As the official companion podcast of the Monuments Toolkit program, we will be deep diving into the pieces of American history found across the nation and how the stories they carry impact the modern day American citizen. The goal of this podcast – and the program at large – is to address the question: how do we address monuments of oppression? What are our options for dealing with painful pieces of our past? How can we learn, heal, and move forward? The aim of the season is to answer these questions while providing listeners with a thought-provoking and engaging experience.
Welcome to The Monumental Project: How Historic Sites and Monuments of Yesterday Affect Us Today. As the official companion podcast of the Monuments Toolkit program, we will be diving deep into the pieces of American history found across the nation, and how the stories they carry impact the modern day American citizen. The goal of this podcast and the program at large, is to address the question “how do we address monuments of oppression?” What are our options for dealing with painful pieces of our past? How can we learn, heal, and move forward? By the end of this season we’ll have a better understanding.
Hosted by Miles Ezeilo.
For the last year and a half, the Monumental Project has taken a close look at all of the pieces of historical preservation, activism, public art and legislation that has created the conversation around monuments of oppression. These conversations, as you can hear in our previous episodes, are extremely multifaceted and nuanced. An array of industries, missions and opinions have created a very interesting mosaic of perspectives. This is a vital part of the monuments toolkit: finding the individual actors and institutions that play a part in this ongoing conversation that we're having, between the art of the past, the perspectives of now and the way we are moving in the future.
With all that being said, it's time that we shine a light on the Monuments Toolkit itself. What are the elements that make this project so interesting? What are the components that we focus on? And what are the next steps for developing research towards this topic? To speak to that we sat down with William Humphrey and Gilbert Correa, two members of the research and publications team for the Monuments Toolkit.
In a very fascinating conversation, we talked about the Monuments Toolkit’s inner workings, what we're aiming to accomplish on a grand scale, the case studies that have made the biggest impact on the project, and the conversations that we need to have in order to continue the best work possible. Enjoy!