Truth + Repair draws from a wide range of theories and practices to co-develop historical research projects around three major themes:

• Social Infrastructure studies the effects of urban renewal, highway construction, park construction, and other metropolitan and regional redevelopment projects on communal health.
• Health Care Systems documents the role of medical education and access in marginalized communities, including the impacts of hospital and clinic closures, grassroots organizing against these closures, the use of home remedies, and the development of mutual aid networks.
• Historical Equity develops strategies to support the state’s under-resourced cultural institutions and organizations that preserve the histories of marginalized New Jerseyans. 

Methods

To accomplish our mission, we partner with cultural institutions and organizations across the state that produce, preserve, interpret, and share historical records that inform their efforts redressing the effects of structural racism in their scholarship and communities. These institutions provide the historical knowledge and materials necessary to define the unique characteristics and impacts of structural racism in New Jersey. In return, we:

Co-design research projects. We ask cultural institutions and organizations what projects they need help developing that align with our mission and one or more or our three themes. Projects can range from surveying documents in a church’s archive or researching an historic neighborhood to digitizing newspaper articles and photos to complement a virtual collection of oral history interviews. For each project, we help define the goals and timelines. 

Conduct community-engaged historical research. Once we’ve defined a project, student researchers from Rutgers, Saint Peter’s, and Princeton Universities and postdoctoral senior research specialists collaborate with our partners and historians from the community to achieve the projects’ aims, using qualitative and quantitative research methods rooted in the principles of community-engaged research. Our student researchers and community partners are encouraged to produce academic papers, journalistic articles, virtual maps and walking tours, documentaries, podcasts, and other works based on their research. All research and research products are shared with our community partners and their patrons. 

Support and connect cultural institutions and organizations. We recognize that many of New Jersey’s cultural institutions and organizations lack needed equipment and staff. So, we use the historical research to help community partners identify areas for investments from policymakers, philanthropies, non-profits, and universities. We plan to write reports and blogposts, host community forums and workshops, advise secondary and post-secondary curricular development on topics in New Jersey history, and inform recommendations for how to redress the impacts of structural racism. In doing so, we hope to encourage the state’s many cultural institutions and organizations to connect and collaborate.

Organization

Truth + Repair is structured as a network of research hubs located at five scholarly and cultural institutions in North, Central and South Jersey. This network provides the organizational structure to monitor student-community research across these varied institutions, maintain close connections with community partners in the area, host meetings with current and potential partners, and outreach to local cultural institutions and organizations. Each hub is led by one or more hub leaders and assigned four-to-five student research assistants, all responsible for creating and conducting historical research on regional and statewide topics developed with local community partners and community historian “mentors,” the latter local historians, archivists, librarians, and other scholars paid as consultants for their long standing connections to and foundational knowledge of community institutions and organizations in the region.