2019-2020 Buttrill Ethics Grant Recipients
With the goal of fostering discussion in a field of inquiry he valued, Carrol O. Buttrill ’38 established a fund through which the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research promotes on-going investigations into ethical questions of significance to the Texas A&M community. The Carrol O. Buttrill ’38 Endowed Fund for Ethics supports annual lectures, roundtables, special events, and course activities.
This grant supports interactions between faculty and students focused on investigations of ethical issues or ethics in general. Efforts may be channeled through teaching, free-standing seminars, panel discussions, symposia, workshops, visiting speakers, or other events. Any activity or event must directly address and wrestle with ethical questions – past or present – pertinent to contemporary societies, cultures, and individuals. Perspectives from any discipline or method are welcome, including the study of texts, histories, philosophies, religious traditions, cultures, aesthetic movements, current events, and theories.
Two awards were granted under this year’s Buttrill Ethics program. Read about the recipients and their projects below.
Andrea Roberts | Assistant Professor, Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning
“Public Engagement and Digital Consent through the Texas Freedom Colonies Storytelling Project”
The project goal is to expand the capacity of Texas Freedom Colonies Atlas (an interactive map of 357 historic black settlements) to engage the public in collecting, curating, and spatializing urban humanities data associated with historic Black settlements. The process involves recording oral histories that yield information about freedom colony locations and origins. Further, Roberts intends to educate descendants about the various approaches they can take to communicating the value of their settlements through archive building and storytelling within their families. From 1865-1930, Black Texans founded 557 mostly rural freedom colonies “unified only by church and school and residents’ collective belief that a community existed” (Sitton, Thad & Conrad, James H., 2005). These often-unmapped communities represent the last connection some African Americans have to their enslaved ancestors. To capture surviving memories of locations and stories, culturally competent approaches to urban humanities data collection reflecting the unique, diasporic spatiality of freedom colony descendants are necessary. This project and event provide applied knowledge about the ethics of data collection, digital and museum curation, and engaged, ethnographic research methods.
Daniel Conway | Professor, Philosophy & Humanities
“Genocide Education and Research”
The topics and issues to be investigated in the seminar will be related to the stated aim of exposing (and, ideally, preventing) the normalization of genocide, and they will be selected so as to reflect the background, talents, and interests of the students enrolled in the seminar. The general significance of these topics and issues will derive from the value assigned to genocide education and research; the specific significance will emerge as the students identify research projects of personal interest to them. In launching this initiative, this project will engage with the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research (CAGR) in Los Angeles. With the assistance of genocide education specialists employed by the CAGR, students enrolled in my seminar will be trained in the use and navigation of the Visual History Archive (VHA), which houses thousands of recorded first-person testimonies by survivors of genocide. The brief to the students will be twofold: to acquire a general familiarity with first-person survivor accounts of genocide; and, subsequently, to home in on a particular topic or theme for further study and research. The topic or theme in question will then become the focus of a long-term research project, a creative exercise in poetry or music or film, an educational intervention, a conference presentation, a student-led symposium, or a psychological/sociological study.