Building Community Self-Esteem: Advocating for Culture

Recording of the 2019 David Buchan Lecture presented by Amy Skillman. Why is our heritage so important? How does culture support our communities? Join us on a folklorist’s journey from scholar to activist to facilitator of change, and back again. Through narratives of migration, motherhood, courage, and food, Skillman uses the transformative power of story to create agency and resilience among refugee and immigrant women in the USA. These stories and more illustrate our responsibility as cultural advocates to help build and foster community self-esteem and well-being. Amy Skillman is Academic Director of the M.A. in Cultural Sustainability at Goucher College. Skillman works at the intersection of culture and tension, where paying attention to culture can serve to mediate social change. She advises artists and community-based organizations on the implementation of programs that honour and conserve cultural traditions, guides them to potential resources, and develops programs to help build their capacity to sustain these initiatives. Her work has included an oral history/leadership empowerment initiative with immigrant and refugee women in Central Pennsylvania, a Grammy-nominated recording of Old-Time fiddlers in Missouri, and a yearlong arts residency with alternative education high school students rooted in the ethnography of their lives. Skillman recently curated a major travelling exhibition that examines the role of folk arts as a catalyst for activism in communities throughout Pennsylvania. https://www.abdn.ac.uk/elphinstone/