Dr. Maria Eugenia Cotera is an associate professor in the Mexican American and Latino Studies Department at the University of Texas—Austin. She holds a PhD from Stanford University’s Program in Modern Thought, and an MA in English from the University of Texas. Her first book, Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture, (University of Texas Press, 2008) received the Gloria Anzaldúa book prize for 2009 from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). Her edited volume (with Dionne Espinoza and Maylei Blackwell), Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Feminism and Activism in the Movement Era (University of Texas Press, 2018) has been adopted in courses across the country. Professor Cotera is the co-founder and project director of the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, an online interactive archive of oral histories and material culture documenting Chicana Feminist praxis over the Long Civil Rights period. She has curated several public history exhibits, including Las Rebeldes: Stories of Strength and Struggle in southeast Michigan (2013) and Chicana Fotos: Nancy De Los Santos (2017) and currently serves as an advisor/consultant numerous large-scale digital public humanities projects focusing on the Latinx experience. Professor Cotera has served on the National Council for the American Studies Association (2007-2010), the governing board of the Latina/o Studies Association (2014-2015), the program committee for the National Women’s Studies Association (2017-2018), and the Arte Público Recovery Project Governing Board (2018-present).
Dr. Andrea Roberts is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and an Associate Director of the Center for Housing & Urban Development at Texas A&M University. Her 15 years’ experience in public administration and community development inform her efforts to move disappearing Black communities from the margin to the center of public discourse through applied research that shapes policy and practice. She is the founder of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, a research & social justice initiative that leverages its Atlas to make visible black placemaking heritage and disparate ecological and development impacts on Black communities.
International Journal of E-Planning Research, The Journal of Planning History; Buildings and Landscapes. Forum Journal, the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, and Planning Theory & Practice have published her work. She is currently writing a book about Black historic preservation practice for The University of Texas Press.
Dr. Roberts earned a Ph.D. in community and regional planning at The University of Texas at Austin in 2016, holds an M.A. in government administration from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, and a B.A. in political science from Vassar College in 1996. In 2020, The Vernacular Architecture Forum awarded Dr. Roberts with the Bishir Award for her Black homestead preservation article. The Urban Affairs Association recognized her Texas Freedom Colonies Atlas with the 2019 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Honorable Mention Award. Dr. Roberts is a 2020 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow, a 2020-21 Visiting Scholar at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, Abolition, and a member of the State Board of Review, which advises Texas’ State Historic Preservation Officer regarding National Register nominations. She also serves on the advisory board of Monument Lab’s National Monument Audit funded by The Mellon Foundation.
Selecting the Keynote Speakers
When the diverse communities of southeast Texas universities and colleges came together in 2019 to put forth a proposal to host ACH 2021 in Houston, they sought to highlight the digital scholarship being produced across Texas. In particular, the Local Organizing Committee (LOC), which includes representatives from various Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), wanted to engage with the types of DH conversations they were having at their campuses, including the histories of underrepresented communities, preservation of cultural heritage, DH for social justice, community archiving, disaster response preservation, personal digital archiving, DH pedagogy, multilingual DH and critical DH.
Although the conference necessarily shifted to a virtual platform, the LOC remains involved in planning for virtual ACH2021 and ACH2022 on site in Houston with many of its members playing active roles on other committees, including the Program Committee.
In choosing the keynotes for the virtual conference, the Program Committee wanted to select speakers whose work focused on preserving and sharing the cultural heritage of underrepresented communities. They wanted speakers who could put into conversation the work being done to recover and make visible Latina/o/x and Black histories, as well as the ethical awareness necessary to do so. Dr. María E. Cotera (University of Texas-Austin) and Dr. Andrea Roberts (Texas A&M University) immediately came to mind.
In Dr. Cotera’s work on the Chicana Por Mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, as well as her scholarship on Chicana Digital Praxis and activism, she re-envisions the archive as an active site of “encuentro”– a communal encounter or interactive conversation that maintains the community involved in its development. Dr. Roberts also centers community and grassroots movements through The Texas Freedom Colonies Project and her scholarship on Black historic preservation. Her work employs various methodologies to bridge grassroots and formal planning and make visible the heritage of Black placemaking in a praxis that has real effects in policymaking.
The Program Committee envisions the keynotes and conversation between Dr. Cotera and Dr. Roberts will anchor ACH 2021 in social justice work and praxis, and most importantly, remind participants about the high stakes of anti-racist work–that is, work that actively questions the ethics of digital and archival procedures and forwards civil rights and inclusivity.