Public Engagement

History & Memory

These public‑facing efforts invite our campus to engage with Southwestern’s history and how that history is remembered—its roots, its eras, and its impacts. Through dialogue, research, art, student leadership, memory work, and collective care, they help us understand how our institutional story has been shaped and how we might tell it differently moving forward.

SU Racial History Project

The SU Racial History Project is a faculty–student research initiative (launched in 2020) that examines Southwestern’s racial history—its untold stories, inequities, and legacies. Students conduct archival research, oral histories, and public scholarship to surface how racism shaped campus life and institutional development.

Placing Memory

An open-ended, student-produced digital map that documents, critiques, and reimagines the commemorative landscape of Southwestern. Through location-based stories, it reveals how campus spaces remember—and forget—people, events, and histories, including those tied to race, gender, and belonging.

Other Local Orgs Doing Similar Work

We work alongside our local Georgetown Community Partners who also bring to the surface the less told histories and memories of our communities. We have worked alongside these partners to both highlight each of our own work and to build off one another’s.

An SU Community-Engaged Naming (memory) Success

Two stories have been brought to the forefront at Southwestern through the community-engaged voting process to name these buildings, as well as by the impact of honoring these important figures in our collective memory. 

Another example of history and memory work on campus: “…The Task Force was established to support an ongoing institutional reflection on how the University commemorates individuals in campus spaces, ensuring that those recognitions align with institutional values.”