News
Meghan Gough named VCU East End Cemetery Collaboratory Fellow
Congratulations to Meghan Gough, associate professor of urban and regional planning at the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs. She has been named one of six VCU East End Cemetery Collaboratory Fellows.
Gough will work on a writing project that examines the role of white institutions and planners engaging in Black sacred spaces and explores the structures that are rooted in white supremacy which create inequity in access and power in order to offer alternative models for a more ethical engagement.
The EECC, a learning community overseen by the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement at the University of Richmond, has brought together a rotating cast of faculty members across multiple departments and disciplines at VCU and UR to engage with Richmond’s historic African American cemeteries. The EECC’s mission is to support the years-long effort to restore these cemeteries by engaging students, faculty, community partners and descendants in the documentation of African American history and culture in Richmond, as well as the reclamation of the cemetery sites. The EECC aims to produce place-based knowledge that contributes to a community dialogue about our collective past.
The Collaboratory’s community partners include the Friends of East End Cemetery as well as a 40-member descendants council recently organized around the cemetery. The Collaboratory received the 2020 Collaboration for Change Award from the Bonner Center for its deep commitment to collaboration, to documentation of African American history in Richmond and to the reclamation of historic cemetery sites.
In collaboration with University of Richmond, VCU’s Office of Institutional Equity, Effectiveness and Success (IES), Office of Community-Engaged Research (CEnR) will assist in funding and designing a framework for an EECC CEnR Faculty and Community Fellows program. Each fellow will receive $1,000 for their contributions.
View all VCU Fellows for the East End Cemetery Collaboratory (EECC)