Public Scholarship
Research is most powerful when it reaches the people it’s about.
For over a decade at the University of Oregon, I have led and collaborated on public scholarship initiatives that connect academic expertise with the communities, organizations, and policy spaces that need it most. This work is never done alone — it is built with faculty, community organizations, non-profits, and community members as equal partners at every stage, from research design through publication and preservation.
The projects below range from Mellon-funded digital humanities research to student-produced environmental justice archives to community art exhibitions. What connects them is a commitment to open access, community ownership of research, and the belief that the people most affected by research should have the most access to it.
Invisible No More: Celebrating Mesoamerican Languages and Communities in Diaspora in Oregon
Oregon’s Mesoamerican Indigenous communities speak dozens of distinct languages — yet most institutions that serve them have no way to bridge that gap. Invisible No More addresses this directly, building open-access digital tools including oral histories, interactive maps, and a language database designed for both community members and the healthcare providers, schools, and agencies that work alongside them.
Partners: Department of Anthropology · Department of Linguistics · UO Libraries · UO Infographics · Community non-profits and community members
Early impact: An OHSU speech pathologist connected with the project to locate speakers of Northern Mam near a patient’s home. The Oregon Historical Society is using the project’s language map in a statewide ethnic studies curriculum for middle and high school students.
Casa y Comunidad: Latino/a/x Housing in Oregon
In the summer of 2022, an all-Latino/a/x team set out to document housing realities for Latino/a/x communities across Oregon’s seven regions — one of the fastest-growing immigrant gateways for Mexican and Central American migrants in the United States. The result is a bilingual oral history documentary series that pairs first-person testimony with a publicly accessible digital archive.
Partners: School of Planning, Public Policy and Management · UO Libraries · Community non-profit partners
Impact: 550+ multimedia items in the open-access archive. Reached 750 individuals including school administrators, nonprofits, and K-12 ethnic studies teachers. Selected for approximately 30 domestic and international film festivals with awards and nominations. Supports Oregon’s state-mandated ethnic studies curriculum (HB 2845/HB 2023).
The Healers Project: Decolonizing Knowledge Within Afro-Indigenous Traditions
A collaborative research project built from years of community work alongside Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Afro-Indigenous peoples in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the Pacific Northwest. The Healers Project creates a digital archive that centers the healers themselves — their knowledge, practices, and stories — as the primary voice and authority.
Partners: Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies · Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · UO Libraries · Digital Library of the Caribbean
Impact: 8,000+ unique users since 2019. Used as an open educational resource in K-12 classrooms across Oregon and in graduate and undergraduate courses at UO. Digital collections archived with the Digital Library of the Caribbean.
Publication: Gaede, F., Lara, A.-M., Reyes-Santos, A., & Thornhill, K. (2022). Afro-Indigenous Women Healers in the Caribbean and Its Diasporas: A Decolonial Digital Humanities Project. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 16(3).
Environmental Justice Research Repository
A digital archive documenting the history of environmental racism in the Eugene-Springfield area, built by UO English capstone students in close collaboration with Beyond Toxics, a leading environmental justice nonprofit in Oregon. The collection brings together previously scattered research materials to create a publicly accessible record of environmental inequities affecting marginalized communities.
Partners: Department of English · UO Libraries · Beyond Toxics
Impact: Provides Beyond Toxics with documented evidence of environmental racism to support advocacy and policy efforts. Serves as a teaching resource at university and K-12 levels. Makes local environmental history openly accessible to researchers, activists, and community members.
Mount Hood Stories: Exploring Racial Ecologies
A collection of interactive essays from Professor Sarah D. Wald’s “Racial Ecologies” graduate seminar, produced in partnership with BARK, an environmental advocacy organization focused on Mt. Hood National Forest. The project surfaces alternative histories of the forest — examining race, ecology, and land use in ways that challenge dominant narratives about public lands.
Partners: Department of English · UO Libraries · BARK
Impact: Featured at BARK’s annual People’s Forest Forum, reaching environmental advocates, land managers, and recreational users. Provides research-grounded perspectives on Mt. Hood’s cultural histories to inform more inclusive approaches to public lands stewardship.
Feeling Documents: Liberated Archives Exhibition
A collaboration between The Holding Contemporary gallery, Don’t Shoot Portland, UO Center for Art Research, and UO Libraries that transformed archival materials and documentary photography into a public art exhibition addressing social justice. The work involved navigating complex access restrictions on journalistic photography, securing licensing, and ensuring ethical use of sensitive historical materials.
Partners: The Holding Contemporary · Don’t Shoot Portland · UO Center for Art Research · UO Libraries
Impact: Demonstrated how university library expertise can directly support community-led creative and social justice work, creating new pathways for community members to engage with historical archives in emotionally resonant and publicly accessible ways.
Oral History Training: Ethics of Sharing Research Results with Participants
Graduate students and researchers from UC Berkeley and UO needed to conduct 120 semi-structured interviews with economists and research participants across Africa — an undertaking that required rigorous preparation in cross-cultural oral history methodology. This training initiative equipped the research team with practical interviewing skills, ethical frameworks, and data management workflows to carry that work out responsibly.
Partners: UO Department of History · UO Department of Economics · UC Berkeley Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) · UO Libraries
Impact: Directly enabled Year 2 research objectives. Findings to be integrated into existing courses reaching an estimated 900 students, with practical trainings offered through CEGA’s Research Transparency and Reproducibility program.
UO Libraries Public Scholarship Internship
A for-credit, paid internship hosted by the UO Libraries Department of Open Research, giving undergraduate students hands-on experience in digital humanities and public scholarship through the Invisible No More project. The program was developed in collaboration with the Tykeson Career Resource Center, the School of Journalism and Communication, and the Department of Anthropology.
Partners: UO Libraries · Tykeson Career Resource Center · School of Journalism and Communication · Department of Anthropology
Impact: Intern Michell Martinez (SOJC ‘25) gained expertise in photograph digitization, metadata management, bilingual website development, and oral history methods. Following the internship she secured a position at UO Libraries Resource Description Services and a Slavic Immigrant Artist in the Northwest internship.