Telling Our Stories of Home: Exploring and Celebrating Changing African Diaspora Communities

FAIN: LD-234358-16

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350)
Tanya Liesel Shields (Project Director: June 2015 to November 2017)

Implementation of a conference-festival, public programs, and educational seminars on the African diaspora in North Carolina.

Faculty and staff at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), in collaboration with five community partners, request funds for a year-long project that will explore how African American and African diasporic experiences have informed and reshaped American notions of home, entitled Telling Our Stories of Home: Exploring and Celebrating Changing African Diaspora Communities. The project will begin with a 6-day conference-festival. This public forum, entitled Telling Our Stories of Home: Celebrating African and African Diaspora Women Artists, is supported by UNC and will occur in April 2016. The public forum-conference-festival will gather scholars engaged in feminist research and civic practices focusing on citizenship, community capacity building, and participatory development with performance artists from the U.S., Brazil, India, Haiti, Uganda, Rwanda, and the U.K. to explore the theme of home through the many methods of sharing stories.