Description

In partnership with Western Michigan University, Dream of Detroit—a Muslim-led neighborhood revitalization organization established in 2013 in a west Detroit neighborhood that is over 90% African American and overwhelmingly low-income—will gather 100 oral history interviews with Detroit-based African American Muslim leaders and members of the communities they serve. The project will also collect audio-visual documentary footage of the leaders and their work, producing a documentary film. Enlisting neighborhood stewards, mosque congregants, students, community filmmakers, and civic activists to take leading roles in developing documentary materials, the project’s approach draws upon the principles of community based participatory research, a method in which the people who are most affected by an issue engage in collaborative knowledge production at every stage of the research process. The documentary film will be launched at Detroit’s Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and individual video interviews and related materials will be housed in a publicly searchable digital archive hosted by Western Michigan University.