Stories of Displacement foregrounds peoples’ experiences of displacement as occasions to generate critical conversations in Baltimore about community safety, support, and flourishing.

This project builds relationships between archives, community organizations, and advocacy groups through collaborations around Baltimore’s oral history collections, including those of Black queer artists, trans activists, displaced East Baltimore residents, Latinx and Indigenous students and workers, refugee cooperative members, among others. While numerous oral history collections are stored across the city, this project seeks to bring these collections into circulation in the form of a podcast series, and further, to transform this material into a series of community events. The project creates programming, support, and links between various oral history projects across the city of Baltimore – specifically thematizing experiences of displacement as distinct yet shared ground to inform the future of policy advocacy.

The project is coordinated by Dr. Marios Falaris, a socio-cultural anthropologist and a postdoctoral fellow with the Tabb Center.

Stories of Displacement consists of four interrelated activities in 2024 and 2025:

  1. Producing and circulating a Tabb Center-hosted podcast series titled “Displaced: Stories from Baltimore,” based on existing oral collections at JHU Special Collections and other archives around Baltimore, as well as new oral history recordings
  2. Expanding the Tabb Center’s Baltimore Queer Oral History Collection through new oral history interviews and soundscape recordings
  3. Trainings in oral history interview techniques and audio recording equipment with three community organizations as well as with additional interested community members.
  4. Facilitating community, activist, and scholarly engagement through two kinds of participatory public events that reckon with singular experiences of displacement while also developing solidarities around shared structures of marginalization. The first event will be a series of listening parties and talk backs, which will be focused on each podcast episode of the series “Displaced: Stories from Baltimore.” The second will be a sound installation featuring audio vignettes and soundscapes from the oral history collections and feature exhibit notes developed with archive and community partners. The event will feature a panel with policy advocates, exploring how solidarities can be formed across distinct experiences of displacement (including race, gender and citizenship).