VT Folklife Guest Presenters at Middlebury College
Vermont Folklife staff members Andy Kolovos, Kate Haughey, and Mary Wesley have recently been invited as guest presenters to several classes at Middlebury College as part of the College’s Mellon Foundation–funded project, Migrant Justice in Vermont and Beyond. With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Humanities For All Times initiative, the College seeks to bring students and faculty together with community partners to explore migration, storytelling, and social justice through research and public humanities work.
From the College’s website:
“This three-year comprehensive and multidisciplinary project will bring attention to migration in all its forms, with a particular focus on the structural, cultural, and financial struggles facing migrants. Middlebury students and faculty will learn about and conduct research on migration and social justice, while also raising public awareness about the issues.” ~ The Axinn Center for Humanities
Vermont Folklife is an acknowledged statewide leader for the relationships we maintain and cultural projects we support with collaborators including artists, cultural leaders, and folks from immigrant and refugee communities. We are grateful for this opportunity to draw on our decades of experience documenting the everyday lives and cultural traditions of communities across Vermont as we connect with students and faculty at Middlebury College.
Since this project began in 2024, our staff have participated in two summer institutes at the College to support faculty as they develop course materials connected to the grant project. As a result of connections made through the institutes we have had the pleasure of visiting multiple classes during the current academic year.
Students in The Migrant’s Journey journalism seminar listen to VT Folklife staff and guests presenters. Photo by Catherine Boyle.
Recent class visits:
Sue Halpern’s journalism seminar The Migrant's Journey - interrogating how migrants and immigration has been represented in the media, including the news, social media, books and film.
Catherine Boyle’s history seminar Migration and Difference at the Crossroads of the Middle East and African Continent.
Olga Sanchez’s Winter Term seminar, La Vida en Vermont - presenting on interviewing and the Most Costly Journey project.
Fulya Pinar’s Migration and Social Justice seminar - presenting on collaborative ethnography, comics and the Most Costly Journey.
VT Folklife staff have discussed collaborative ethnographic methods, oral history interviewing, and approaches to collaborative knowledge production. We have also highlighted materials in our Archive and fieldwork that reflect Vermont’s cultural communities such as:
The Most Costly Journey project - an ethnographic cartooning and graphic medicine project that uses collaborative storytelling as a tool to mitigate loneliness, isolation, and despair among Latin American migrant farm workers on Vermont dairy farms.
Our Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program, which supports traditional artists from a variety of backgrounds who have learned their crafts and art forms through oral transmission and informal, multigenerational apprenticeship-like settings. During the past 30-plus years, VT Folklife has supported over 400 apprenticeships representing everything from the arts of native Abenaki and of English, French, Polish and Irish immigrants, to those of Lao, Somali Bantu, Congolese, Bosnian, Tibetan and Bhutanese Nepali refugee communities. These art forms reflect the cultural history, values, and aesthetics of the groups that practice them, and for all communities, including those with immigrant and refugee backgrounds, supporting traditional arts and cultural practices helps to shape identity and support both individual and community wellbeing.
Read more about other community connections happening through this initiative here on the Middlebury College website.