Places Journal featured Brandi T. Summers in a conversation series with public historian and archivist Moriah Ulinskas on activism in Oakland, California, since the 1960s.
Summers is an associate professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, where she is the director of Graduate Studies.
In addition, Summers leads a team of students, scholars, and housing justice organizers in assembling the Archive of Urban Futures. Founded in 2022 and funded by the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities in Place Program, the Archive is a research and teaching collaboration with Moms 4 Housing, an organization — and a movement — that began in 2019 when a collective of unhoused Black mothers occupied an empty, investor-owned home in West Oakland.
The article in Places is an edited version of her conversation with Ulinskas, who is a public historian whose research focuses on resistance to displacement by marginalized communities, examining such histories as they lie latent in archival collections. For six years, she was the volunteer shepherd of a photographic collection left by the now-defunct Oakland Redevelopment Agency, exploring how these photographs challenge the declension narrative of postwar cities like Oakland.
