Image Credit: Annabel Podeyn
Communal Archives
As we continue to explore and build, we also want to remember and preserve the legacies that come before us and the ones that are still with us, because every community carries stories that are never written into history books.
Communal Archives is an ongoing storytelling initiative dedicated to preserving personal histories, oral traditions, lived experiences, and voices that might otherwise be lost to time. Through interviews, oral histories, and collaborative projects, this archive seeks to honor the richness and diversity of human experience while creating a space where individuals can choose to have their stories remembered.
Projects within the archive may explore subjects ranging from end-of-life experiences and regional history to cultural traditions and communities whose stories deserve greater visibility.
The inaugural project will focus on the stories of hospice patients. Many people nearing the end-of- life experience profound isolation, and some belong to communities whose histories have too often been overlooked, misunderstood, or left undocumented. Drawing upon personal lived experience with death doula practices of bedside companionship, deep listening, and witnessing, this project seeks to preserve selected life stories—with each participant's explicit consent—as a lasting record of their experiences, wisdom, and humanity.
Throughout the southeastern United States, generations of communities have preserved rich cultural traditions, religions, spiritual practices, folklore, oral histories, and systems of knowledge that have shaped regional identity for centuries. Yet simultaneously within American history, many of these faiths, traditions, and cultural practices have been misunderstood, marginalized, mocked, demonized, pathologized or criminalized due to a long history tied to enslavement, colonialism, and efforts to suppress cultural and religious practices.
Through interviews and conversations with university scholars, historians, criminal justice professionals, clergy, practitioners, and community elders across five states-including Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana-this archive documents the histories and contemporary expressions of rural African American, Creole, Gullah Geechee, and Appalachian communities. The project explores the religions, spiritual traditions, folklore, rituals, healing practices, oral histories, and lived experiences that continue to shape the region, including African Traditional Religions, African Diaspora religions, Appalachian folk traditions, and other regional systems of faith, culture, and community life.
By preserving these voices in their own words, the archive seeks to document and safeguard knowledge that has too often been overlooked, misrepresented, or excluded from mainstream historical narratives while highlighting the cultural diversity, historical connections, and enduring resilience of these multicultural communities throughout the American Southeast.