Our panel will discuss two community-centered collaborative projects from Virginia Commonwealth University’s (VCU) Humanities Research Center’s Health Humanities Lab that center the voices of those who have been marginalized and excluded from dominant historical accounts.

The East Marshall Street Well (EMSW) Oral History and Memorialization Project focuses on amplifying the priorities of the EMSW Project’s Family Representative Council (FRC), which represents the descendants of the 53 people whose remains were discovered during the 1994 construction of a VCU medical building. Further research revealed that the bodies of mostly Black enslaved Richmonders had been stolen from their graves during the mid-19th century and used for instruction in the Medical College of Virginia (MCV, later VCU Medical Center), then dumped in the well. This project chronicles this history and subsequent efforts toward community-led reparative justice.

MCV opened St. Philip Hospital and School of Nursing in 1920 as a segregated institution to provide care for Richmond’s Black community and to prepare Black nurses. For over four decades, St. Philip School of Nursing served as a premier formal nurse training program that afforded Black women a pathway into higher education before its closure in 1962. Yet from the beginning, nursing education was based on racialized exclusionary policies, forms of professional marginalization and exclusion cost nurses, patients, and the broader community.
The St. Philip School of Nursing Oral History Project focuses on the experiences and contributions of Black nurses in Virginia. This project makes accessible accounts from women who studied, worked, and challenged gendered and racialized boundaries in their nursing pursuits. Through exploring identity, this project recognizes their coming-of-age narratives, professional pathways, and legacy within/outside the profession.

Through the two projects, our panel provides a forum for exploring personhood, sociopolitical systems, and the implications of institutional histories of marginalization and exploitation on healthcare education today.

Associate Professor, Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies; Director, Health Humanities Lab; Co-director, East Marshall Street Well Oral History and Memorialization Project

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations