Aaron Bonsu: “The Political Road to the Games: Sport, Transportation, and the Shaping of Greater Boston’s Urban Landscape”

In Boston, sport team owners, residential groups, and civic leaders all vie to influence the future development of sport venues in the Massachusetts capital. Through a brief analysis of a key theme within my dissertation, transportation, I demonstrate how these interest groups use political action in their contestation of sport venues in Greater Boston. This overlap of politics, transportation, and venue construction helps highlight how residents, through sport, shape the landscape of their communities.

Edwin Dartey: “Decolonizing Language Planning: Insights from Afro-Communitarian Thought and Fanon’s Theorization of the Colonial Encounter”

In this presentation, I will discuss a two-tier theoretical framework that challenges monolingual and colonial assumptions in language planning, offering an inclusive and situated approach to Global Southern contexts. Drawing on Afro-communitarian philosophies of personhood and Frantz Fanon’s theorization of the colonial encounter, I interrogate the entangled histories of race, power, and colonialism that shape how multilingualism is negotiated and how language policies are formulated in African contexts.

Ashleigh McDonald, Center and Institutes Fellow: “A Strange Paradox of Mannequins”: Institutional(ized) Memory in the Glore Psychiatric Museum

As the biggest of the three small museums dedicated to the history of psychiatry, the Glore Psychiatric Museum has a large impact on how institutionalization is remembered. This is a selective remembering though, one that emphasizes a narrative of good intentions while often forgetting the human cost and consequences of psychiatric progress. This analysis focuses on how Glore makes some memories visible and sayable while simultaneously institutionalizing others.