&
QA
WITH TODD LAWRENCE, PH.D., ’95,
associate professor of English and American culture and difference, University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Q: Do you consider yourself primarily a folklorist, or an ethnographer, literary scholar, or all of the above? A: That’s a fair question, because I do a lot of stuff. I’m a literary scholar — I teach African American literature primarily, and I write about it, too. You can think of folklore as a body of material, or different kinds of expression, and ethnography is a way of studying it. Ethnography is a particular research methodology, so when I say that I’m an ethnographer, it just means that I do a certain thing in researching about groups of people. I was always taken with ethnography as a practice, theorizing it and thinking about ways it can be more collaborative, ways that it can be more equitable, ways that it can be more honest. Q: Where does your interest in folklore come from? A: It was actually Doc (Francis) Sheeran (Ph.D., Rockhurst professor emeritus of English) who talked to me about going to graduate school because he had some connections at Creighton University, so I entered an M.A. program there. And I found out about folklore as an area of study when I went to the University of Missouri (doctoral program). I realized that people in my family were practitioners of folklore, and that you could study proverbs and you could study joke-telling cycles, and you could study traditional music and traditional knowledge. It’s all of the traditional things that people say, make, believe, know, and do, which covers a lot of area. Q: Your book When They Blew the Levee tells the story of the residents of Pinhook, Missouri, a small community that was flooded when the Army Corps of Engineers breached a levee to save the town of Cairo, Illinois. What was the genesis of that book and what was it like to tell that story?
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A: We started that in the fall of 2011. Elaine Lawless (Ph.D., Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita at the University of Missouri) asked me if I was interested in working together. We went down there and started talking to people and learned an amazing story about the people of Pinhook. It was not just about the disaster, but also about their community before the disaster occurred. The book is their story, filtered through us as writers. It’s their response to the “official” account of that whole 2011 flood. They are some of the most amazing people I have ever met. Writing that book changed my life. Q: Tell us about the ongoing Urban Art Mapping Project. A: Two UST colleagues and I started that project three years ago with a team of students. We were mapping and documenting street art in a single neighborhood in St. Paul. Then the pandemic hits and then three months after that, George Floyd is murdered right here, in front of our eyes, and the Twin Cities just exploded. In the aftermath of the uprising, we saw art everywhere in the streets. The plywood boards that went up on all the buildings became outdoor canvasses. We recognized the art was amazing, but we knew it would disappear quickly. So, we went on social media and asked people out in the streets to help us by photographing George Floyd-related street art and sending it to us. A year later we have more than 2,500 pieces documented from around the world. Our goal is to create the largest digital database of street art anywhere in the world around subjects like police violence, COVID-19, global warming, elections, etc. In the case of George Floyd, this art allows us to see what people were feeling inside, both individually and collectively, during a moment of social upheaval.
