Dear Readers,<\/p>\n
In the weeks and months following August 12, 2017, members of the Boston University community struggled\u2014like Americans everywhere\u2014to comprehend the series of troubling, and tragic, events which would come, almost immediately, to be denoted in the national imagination by the metonym \u201cCharlottesville.\u201d This special issue of Impact: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning <\/i>comprises a series of responses to these events and their aftermath, as well as the conditions which enabled them, by faculty members from across the BU campus.<\/p>\n
A range of disciplines and fields of study are represented in the contributions which follow: African American studies, theology, rhetoric, political science, American studies, humanities. What all share, however, is a deep concern with history; each insists, in its own way, on the vital importance of contextualizing Charlottesville by making connections with the past. (For many, the events of last summer are only the most recent reminder of the essential truth of Faulkner\u2019s often-quoted aphorism: \u201cThe past is never dead. It\u2019s not even past.\u201d)<\/p>\n
These responses take different forms as well, from dialogue to essay. The first piece, \u201cA Historian\u2019s Take on Charlottesville,\u201d derives from Joelle Renstrom\u2019s wide-ranging interview with Ashley Farmer. The next three contributions grow from the \u201cLessons from Charlottesville\u201d event which took place on September 19, 2017 in the George Sherman Union Metcalf Ballroom at BU\u2019s Charles River campus. This event, organized by Dr. Virginia Sapiro (Professor of Political Science, CAS), was the first of the BU Dean of Students Office\u2019s newly-launched Student-Faculty Forum, a series that aims to bring together the BU community around the discussion of current topics of particular interest and importance. Three participants in this conversation\u2014Walter Fluker, Nina Silber, and Spencer Piston\u2014have contributed modified versions of their remarks here, which historicize the events of Charlottesville from different disciplinary perspectives (the brevity and informality of these pieces reflects their origin as oral remarks). Finally, a longer essay by Cheryl Boots juxtaposes two sets of events separated by half a century, the Danville demonstrations of 1963 and the \u201cUnite the Right\u201d rally of 2017, contrasting the role played by singing and chanting, respectively, in each. I am grateful to my colleagues across BU for sharing their timely and insightful reflections with Impact.<\/i><\/p>\n
Best,<\/p>\n
Aaron Worth, Editor<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Editorial Statement Dear Readers, In the weeks and months following August 12, 2017, members of the Boston University community struggled\u2014like Americans everywhere\u2014to comprehend the series of troubling, and tragic, events which would come, almost immediately, to be denoted in the national imagination by the metonym \u201cCharlottesville.\u201d This special issue of Impact: The Journal of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9762,"featured_media":0,"parent":1658,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1660"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9762"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1660"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1745,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1660\/revisions\/1745"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}