September 01, 2022
Sylvia Hickman, WPAMC '23
Kerista was an urban commune based in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, which I had the pleasure of studying as part of a class on the material culture of America's communal utopias. Active in its most successful iteration from 1971 to 1991, Kerista was a small group of no more than 30 people at any given time. They were most known for their practice of polyfidelity, a form of non-monogamy in which ...
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August 05, 2022
Abi Lua WPAMC '22
A couple weeks prior to our Southern Trip, our professors asked our class what cultural heritage sites we would want to see during our trip. In light of my research interests, I requested to visit sites that reflected connections between the South and global material culture. Whenever I would think about global material culture and the U.S., I most often think of ...
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July 22, 2022
Grace Ford-Dirks, WPAMC '23
Our recent field study trip to the American South gave us a brief glimpse into many different “Souths.” At every new site, however, we continued to confront questions of absence and presence. We visited rare surviving quarters for the enslaved in Virginia and South Carolina, and in contrast, saw a thoughtful reconstruction of enslaved quarters on Somerset Plantation in North Carolina that mediated some of the persistent ...
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July 11, 2022
By Austin Losada WPAMC '23
At the center of Wes Craven’s 1982 film Swamp Thing is the distinct landscape of the South (Fig. 1).[1] While set in Louisiana, the filming took the cast and crew to South Carolina where the boggy Cypress Gardens and historic Aiken-Rhett House served as the backdrop for the movie. The film and comic series follow scientist Alec Holland who creates a bio-restorative formula to solve world hunger but falls ...
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