Our Mission
HACER Lab is a visible and vibrant hub for students, faculty, staff, and community practitioners engaged in the research, teaching, and practice of public humanities in UConn Waterbury’s urban setting.
The acronym for our lab, hacer, is a Spanish verb that can be translated as: to make, to do, to act, to create, to cause, and more. The goal for all HACER projects is to explore and challenge how knowledge is created through community-engaged research facilitated by equitable and meaningful community partnerships.
The mission of HACER Lab is to build and maintain an infrastructure for public humanities projects, community-driven research, and life-transformative educational experiences for undergraduate students at UConn Waterbury.
Our Praxis
The HACER Lab allows participants to practice reciprocal learning through action and community-based public research that emphasizes
- the full participation and leadership of all members of the research or/and creative project teams at every stage of their projects;
- the communal production of knowledge by and for academic researchers, students, and community members; and
- collaborative social action that improves the well-being of community members.
Current Projects
Mapping, Documenting and Digitalizing Latin American and Caribbean communities in Waterbury
Students and community members at UConn Waterbury are collaborating to create a community digital library that highlights the often unheard and hidden stories of Latin American and Caribbean communities in Waterbury. This initiative is a partnership between the Urban and Community Studies program at UConn Waterbury and the Afro-Caribbean Cultural Center. The project aims to develop a digital, open-access platform that will showcase the collected materials, allowing for ongoing contributions and engagement from the Waterbury community.
Waterbury Reimagined
"Waterbury Reimagined" is a collaborative multimedia project that aims to document the urban changes in Waterbury. The project includes a variety of formats such as videos, photography, and community interviews to explore the city's past, present, and future. It consists of two main components: 1) Research tour guide projects developed as part of the URBN1300: "Exploring Your Community" course; and 2) a video series that examines both the visible and invisible changes in the city's neighborhoods, infrastructure, and social fabric over time through a critical lens.
Reading Talking Books: Theories of Race and Reading from Nineteenth-Century America
The history of reading in America is intimately connected to the idealization of whiteness by our democratic institutions. Throughout U.S. history. advocates for education, especially literacy education, have argued that the ability to read and write is essential for the U.S. democratic project. At the same time, systemic racism in U.S. education, beginning with 19th-century U.S. laws that prohibited Black Americans from learning to read and write, has conspired to disenfranchise members of racial and ethnic minority communities. Our research traces this entwined history of racism and reading instruction to ask how we might value literacy differently, if it were not tied to the privileges of citizenship.