Campus Disorientation Tours as Critical Historical Practice

• In Event: Truth-Telling and Transformation: Critical, Reparative, and Community-Engaged Historical Methods Across Educational Contexts

Abstract

This paper examines how historical campus disorientation tours transform overlooked institutional spaces into sites of historical inquiry and insight. Drawing on a University Medical School as a case study, this work demonstrates how physical spaces, e.g., hallways, classrooms, and buildings, serve as primary sources that embed and perpetuate racialized and gendered historical narratives (Bonilla-Silva & Peoples, 2022). The tours attend to institutional space as both archive and text, employing what I term “critical campus cartography” or the practice of mapping and decoding the visual and material narratives embedded in educational environments.

Theoretical Framework & Methodology

The tours function as “critical revisionist excavations” (García & Yosso, 2020) that recover hidden histories embedded in seemingly neutral spaces. Through a roving discourse, institutional narratives are examined, challenged, and disrupted as we collectively expand our historical understanding and generate alternative narratives (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). Further, students consider how spaces, art, and artifacts actively produce knowledge while simultaneously being shaped by racialized histories (Hudson & McKittrick, 2014).

Through spatial counter-storytelling, students encounter artifacts, such as class photos dating to 1862, alongside romanticized depictions of medical discoveries, learning to problematize these images through historical contextualization. For example, paintings celebrating scurvy treatments omit the colonial and slavery contexts in which such discoveries occurred, including how physicians on 18th-century slave ships used confined human spaces as "natural" medical laboratories (Downs, 2020).

Recognizing that traditional archives can perpetuate exclusions, the project extends beyond physical tours through an interactive ArcGIS StoryMap that makes invisible histories visible. This digital tool includes personal video documentation of temporary exhibits and removed materials, creating a living archive that captures the dynamic nature of institutional narrative-making. Though in its early stages, the StoryMap enables self-guided exploration to democratize access to critical historical analysis.

Data & Results

Research included exploring physical and digital archives (including the Bentley Historical Library); content analysis of various institutional websites, repositories, and databases; review of secondary sources; analysis, triangulation, confirming and disconfirming evidence, and collaborative pedagogical development.

Foundational to this work is recognition of the lived experiences of people whose narratives are not always visible, heard, or centered, but whose stories are very much part of the University's history. While these stories can serve to resist dominant narratives, they are not only formed in response to dominant narratives. They comprise knowledge, wisdom, and power in and of themselves. By sharing counterstories, the tours help shift narratives about race, moving away from the problem frame to frames of power, inspiration, healing, and humanity.

Significance

The tours model how educators can navigate restrictive legislative contexts while maintaining commitment to truthful history. By treating institutional space as primary source material, the intervention creates opportunities for critical engagement that resist sanitized historical narratives while building students' capacity for historical analysis.

Author

• Tonya Kneff-Chang, University of Michigan