#  Government Fellow 2021-22 

 





"How is it that collective memory can be used as a way to produce and expand the notion of future? How can we build multiple ideas about the future through listening to the stories of folks who are organizing for better tomorrows?"



 

April 11, 2022

 

 

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KARILYN CROCKETT: Hi. I'm Karilyn Crockett. I am a Professor of urban history, public policy, and planning at MIT. I am also here at HDS as the Religion and Public Life Government Fellow.

The things I think about in my research life is very much about land, land use, and the process of turning land into property. And particularly thinking about how people resist these kinds of processes as we produce highways, bridges, canals, electrical systems, and the way that these large-scale infrastructure projects really limit lived life, really limit the production of just communities.

And so, a question for me is essentially how is it that collective memory can be used as a way to produce and expand the notion of future? How can we build multiple ideas about the future through listening to the stories of folks who are organizing for better tomorrows?

And so, a lot of my work has been centered on community organizing, mobilizing at the grassroots levels, and learning how these particular types of collective actions fueled by collective memory have produced new forms of policy, new directions for government actors at the local, state, and federal levels.

I come to this work as someone who's worked in community but also as someone who has served in government. I have served as the Director of Economic Policy and Research for the city of Boston for four years, and in that work learned very much about the power of, again, grassroots activists, coalitions saying no to features that don't include them, to features that don't reflect their values, and specifically in the city of Boston, what we learned in our own history of stopping interstate highway growth.

So there's a well known story about how activists in the city had come together in 1965 and '66 and '67 to stop the growth of I95. And that decisive action was defining for how the city of Boston and even the federal government at that time thought about urban livability, walkability, equity, and health.

And so those stories, so many of them that come to us from a generation or two ago are really important to lift up to think about how we want to think through not only government practice and policy but also the way that our architects and planners, organizers and scholars can be more thoughtful and mindful around the ways that we use space, the ways that we think about government's role in that, and how we can become better listeners to everyday people, better listeners to people who live in community and have the actual courage and determination to build plans that we need to support, and also, we need to understand as held and exemplified through government practice that is shared.



 

 

 



 

 See also:- [ Burning Questions ](/featured-feed/burning-questions)
- [ Religious Literacy and the Professions ](/news/religious-literacy-and-professions)