Explore the Projects

We often tell the history of Lawrence, Kansas from the perspective of settlement in the “great American desert.” Even moments of dis-settlement, such as Quantrill’s Raid, are couched as victorious resettlement.

Topeka has a wealth of citizens who can recall the impact of the Brown v. Board decision on their lives and within the Topeka community before and after the historic decision.

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{B/qKC}, formerly known as Black/queer Kansas City, is a Black queer digital archive educating the Kansas City community on the contributions of local Black LGBTQIA2S+ community members.

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Founded in 2010, the American Indian Digital History Project works with Tribal archives, community members, organizations, and colleges to recover, preserve, and increase free & open searchable access to rare Indigenous newspapers, photographs, and archival materials throughout Native North America.

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We are beginning a digital history project that will document and analyze the major events and themes of the Civil Rights struggle in Kansas City.

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This audiobook project will make available a poetic memoir that speaks to the difficulties of growing up as a Black male on the East Coast of the United States.

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The Toni Morrison Society’s Bench by the Road Project has placed benches and accompanying plaques at 32 sites around the world memorializing people and events from African American and African diasporic history. 

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This documentary storytelling project shows how classical music in urban communities inspires intuitive movement and value. It describes how classical music creates instantaneously powerful movements and leaders through interdisciplinary dialogue around the arts, history and sciences.

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Building Black Kansas City is an oral history project focusing on the African American experience in Kansas City, MO in the mid twentieth century, beginning at the end of World War II.

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Each academic year, the Arts Research Integration (ARI) at the Spencer Museum of Art organizes an inquiry that encompasses a large spectrum of practitioners across the arts, sciences, and humanities.

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Focusing on the diversity, adversity, and struggles of Latin American and African immigrants in the Heartland, this initiative asks how the new digital age affects the stories that immigrants tell, as well as the possibilities for their visibility in the wider community.

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This project offers education in digital storytelling technology to women transitioning from incarceration. Based on a co-design approach, the program participants will learn and use digital storytelling techniques to tell their own stories of challenges and opportunities related to online privacy and security.

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In 2022, the Watkins Museum decided to expand its permanent exhibit on Indigenous peoples in Douglas County beyond two exhibit panels. 

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This project attempts to apply a macro lens to a community’s response to a global situation through in-depth analysis of local newspapers’ coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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“COVID-19 stories” includes formal narratives, social media stories, snapshots, drawings, or anything else that captures experiences of the pandemic in Douglas County, Kansas.

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Decolonizing Information Paths: (Re) Visualizing Indigenous Sovereignty in Academic Libraries provides a decolonized version of academic librarianship by employing digital storytelling techniques to delineate networks of Indigenous librarianship, acknowledging the sovereignty of that professional network.

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The Lawrence Public Library launched this project in partnership with the Watkins Museum of History in 2017. A portal to digital local history, Digital Douglas County History uses Omeka, an open source web-publishing platform, as its framework.

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On July 19, 1958, a group of Wichita students began a movement, the Dockum Drug Store Sit-In, that would become a critical moment in the history of ending segregation.

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Twenty-first century attempts to commemorate the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till have been met with persistent vandalism. Born in direct response to that vandalism, the Emmett Till Memory Project is a website and mobile application that preserves the sites and stories of the Till lynching.

Finding La Yarda is an immersive multimedia art experience recreating a room from La Yarda, the housing unit built for Mexican American railroad workers in Lawrence, Kansas from 1920-51. Using film, sound, art and digital storytelling practices, Finding La Yarda brings oral history to life by taking audiences on a cultural journey through time and place.

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For 11 years, the Free State Story Slam storytelling series has had a home at the Lawrence Arts Center.

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The project chronicles the pursuit of disability rights and justice in Kansas as an ongoing struggle. Some fifty years ago, a disability rights movement emerged in the United States along with passage of federal laws mandating accessibility and forbidding discrimination.

GeoTestimonios is a living border-community storytelling project that reappropriates personal experiences through testimonies and literary narratives about life in the El Paso-Juárez border region.

GeoTestimonios es un proyecto narrativo de comunidades fronterizas que reapropia experiencias personales a través de testimonios y narrativas literarias sobre la vida en la región fronteriza de El Paso-Juárez.

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This Indigenous videogame, based in the O’odham and Pee Posh cultures, incorporates traditional stories that guide the player from creation narratives to the near present, celebrating the unification and continuations of culture.

The Wak'o Mujeres Phu Nu Womxn Mural Project: Stories of Kansas Women of Color, nearly eight feet tall and half a city block in length, is a project for women of color, by women of color, to empower women of color. The mural was based on over twenty oral histories conducted by the Women of Color Makers Collective. These oral histories will now be transcribed, digitized, and shared with the public in the form of podcasts and an online digital exhibition.

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Since its establishment in 1983, the History of Black Writing (HBW) has committed to literary recovery work and public programming.

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“Invested Stayers: Portraits of Teachers who Thrive in Challenging Times” features stories of K-12 teachers in U.S. schools who we call invested stayers, or those who have persisted and thrived in the teaching profession.

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This project will result in 25 oral history interviews documenting the historical lived experiences and perceptions of the museum among multiple Kansas City communities.

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KANSAS: An Eclogue will be a full-length documentary film. The project evolved from a walking journey across the state of Kansas by the film’s co-directors, Patrick Ross and Joshua Nathan, independent filmmakers from Kansas, now living in Los Angeles, CA.

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Scholarly and popular accounts of the U.S.-Mexico border, one of the world’s most contentious geopolitical divides, often depict nearby communities as caught between clashing nations.

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Storytelling has long played an important role in filling the void of Black history which is often excluded from the pages of American History books.

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Our Tomorrows utilizes a novel framework to capture family experiences about thriving and surviving to inform policies and practices to better meet the needs of families.

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This project serves two main purposes, both of them anchored around Guatemala specifically and Central America in general. The first aim of the project is to create a digital repository dedicated to Maya K’iche’ language learning.

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This music video will tell regional stories of police brutality. The song describes the beautiful life and dreams of a young Black man whose life is taken too soon by police in his neighborhood.

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IPE@KUMC/KU preserves the history and continuing contributions to interprofessional practice and education (IPE) by The University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) and The University of Kansas (KU) through a podcast series, oral histories, and archival documents to be preserved in collaboration with the Clendening History of Medicine Library and KUMC Archives.

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Queer Voices gathers local LGBTQ+ members together for evenings of story telling from our community. Speakers share true stories from their lives that run the gamut from historic protests, bad first dates, to the dangers and joys of existing in Kansas as a queer person.

“Reclaiming Home” will tell the story of Topeka’s Bottoms neighborhood through oral history, a documentary and art. In the 1950s and ’60s, more than 3,000 Topekans were forced to leave their homes and businesses in the Bottoms district in downtown to make way for new real estate development as part of the Urban Renewal Project.

The rePRO Film Periodical is a free, monthly newsletter available via email and online. Each issue centers an area of reproductive and health and justice and includes a curated short film, an original interview podcast featuring storytellers and activists, further reading and links to advocacy organizations.

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38N invites Kansans to tell their stories of adventure in the Sunflower State. Outdoor novices and accomplished adventurers, skilled and unskilled artists, are all welcome to tell their Kansas adventure stories in their own, unique manner.

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This project will collect stories from local black families about the racial history of Lawrence, KS. In recent years, the local NAACP chapter has worked with the city and the Equal Justice Initiative to bring high-profile moments of local racism to light.

Sexualized violence survivors are often considered socially suspect voices in the accounting of their own experiences, and given undersized roles in shaping the narrative that makes sense of what justice looks like after acts of sexualized violence.

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We are a museum dedicated to educating people about and preserving the heritage of the American Indian for future generations.

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This Audiowalk is a work of historical scholarship, a call to arms, and a motivational tool for continued efforts toward reproductive justice.

This project consists of oral histories of Kansas Chicano Movement leaders from the 1970s.These activists drew inspiration from the national Chicano Movement and their initiatives impacted the Kansas Latinx population in ways that reverberate to this day in the areas of civil rights, educational opportunities and voting power.

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The Queer Narratives Festival is an annual performing and visual arts festival highlighting the Kansas City LGBTQ+ community. By prioritizing the LGBTQ+ community, it offers a safe space for artists and audiences to express themselves fully.

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The American Jazz Museum’s permanent exhibition features four prominent icons, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker.

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Over the last 10-15 years there has been a noticeable increase in interest in the field of queer rural studies to correct for previous assumptions that queer history was always urban and usually on the coast.

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Untold Stories is an arts-based community-action project, seeking to illuminate the experiences of older adults through conversation, collaboration, art, and advocacy.

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“Untold Stories: Former Enslaved Americans Who Sought Freedom in Lawrence, KS” shines a light on explores the often-overlooked reality of life for the previously enslaved, who continued to struggle to achieve equality long after the war.

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Of the sixty million Americans providing care to a family member, two thirds are women providing care to aging mothers.

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Gentrification, the calculated reclamation of black urban spaces for financially affluent new homeowners, is spreading through black communities across America.

Who Gets To Parent? is a series of short digital stories, a cross between documentary and vlog, that looks at the experiences of Queer, Trans and BIPOC people navigating pregnancy and birthing within a medical system that presents many systemic barriers that are racist, classist, xenophobic, sexuality and sexist based.

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Nonwhite entrepreneurs rarely appear in broad-based histories or surveys of American enterprise. Existing studies of ethnic/nonwhite businesses focus upon commercial operations; this project gives priority to illuminating the motivations of nonwhite individuals to become entrepreneurs.