About Continuing Conversations

A team of humanities scholars, including historians, cultural anthropologists, and library scientists, has created its inaugural collection of curated content that interprets questions of what it means to make a meaningful life under specific circumstances at particular moments in time. Each curated collection consists of a cross-section of videotaped oral life narratives gatherd by Community Researchers in the City of East Cleveland, transcripts of those select videotapes, and a number of exhibits that highlight emerging themes.

Our first collection features the stories of African American women and what they reveal about East Cleveland, their personal and collective histories and broader cultural and historical issues. The material is organized into three exhibits "Intergenerational Bonds," "Community Building & Activism," and "Place Making and Race."

The Interactive "Continuing Conversations" website invites you to participate by submiitting your own memories and experiences, as stories, pictures, or short videos, along the same thematic lines.

Featured Exhibit

Place Making and Race

What does it mean to make a place your own? Is it a house, a family, a community? How do our memories and attachments make places meaningful to us? How does race intersect that meaning-making process? How does history, personal and public, interact with our experiences of a place? How do we pass on our stories of place? This exhibit in the collection, based on the stories of East Cleveland women, examines these questions. We hope that you will respond in your own way to these explorations of place-making and race.