New book features UMBC & Center for Democracy and Civic Life

UMBC and the Center for Democracy and Civic Life are featured in a new e-book, The Place Collaboratory: Higher Education, Community Engagement, and the Public Humanities. Dr. David Hoffman Ph.D. '13, is also one of the book's contributing writers. The chapter "University of Maryland, Baltimore County and and Community Precarity" begins on page 47.

From 2019 to 2022 UMBC participated in a national partnership called the PLACE Collaboratory, organized by Bringing Theory to Practice and funded by the Mellon Foundation. The partnership explored how humanities methods could be used to support community-driven social change. UMBC's Baltimore PLACE Project involved community organizing in two Baltimore City neighborhoods, Brooklyn and Curtis Bay. 

Center for Democracy and Civic Life staff played leading roles in designing and implementing UMBC's Baltimore PLACE project along with Center for Social Science Scholarship Associate Director Felipe Filomeno, also an associate professor of political science and global studies, and eight undergraduate fellows. Dr. Hoffman and Dr. Romy Hubler, former Center for Democracy and Civic Life associate director, developed and co-taught a class with Dr. Filomeno to prepare the PLACE fellows for their roles.

"The Baltimore PLACE Project was a wonderful opportunity to blend insights from the humanities with the community organizing and community-building approaches at the heart of the Center for Democracy and Civic Life's work," says Hoffman. "The work Center leaders did with Felipe Filomeno and the undergraduate PLACE fellows was deeply meaningful and empowering, as the book describes: a student affairs/academic affairs collaboration that really worked well. All of us on the UMBC team shared stories and learnings with partners across the U.S. as we adapted to the COVID-19 lockdowns and supported imaginative work toward community-identified objectives."

Learn more about UMBC's PLACE project and how it empowered students as civic actors.