Chancellor's Distinguished Visiting Scholar Mercy Romero on Doing Research in and about Camden

Chancellor’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar Mercy Romero will deliver a Keynote Address on doing research in and about Camden, NJ. Join us for a conversation where Romero will discuss her experience doing research for her book Toward Camden, and her perspective, both as a scholar and former resident of the city, on how academics can engage in research in and about communities. We look forward to a lively conversation amongst research students (both undergraduate and graduate), faculty, staff, and members of the community.  

Join us after the Keynote Address for a hands-on workshop that uses passages from Toward Camden as inspiration for telling your own stories that explore doing research in and around specific communities, urban spaces and abandoned lots.  

The workshop is presented in partnership with the Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE) and the Office of the Chancellor at Rutgers-University Camden.

Both the Keynote Address and the Workshop will take place at the Center for Digital Studies at Johnson Park Library. Food and drinks provided.

About Toward Camden

In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family’s house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city’s vacant lots withhold.

About Mercy Romero

Dr. Mercy Romero is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California Irvine. Dr. Romero’s work has been recognized by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the National Endowment for the Humanities and Ford Foundation, and by the Mellon Foundation and Flamboyan Foundation that selected Dr. Romero as one of the inaugural Letras Boricuas fellows. The centerpiece of Dr. Romero’s work is her book Toward Camden, a beautiful and thought-provoking combination of memoir and scholarly study of place that Publishers Weekly called “elegiac yet hopeful” and “full of power.” Reflecting on her own experience growing up in Camden’s Cramer Hill neighborhood, Dr. Romero thinks deeply about Camden’s place in personal and public histories and asks the reader to consider what stories might emerge if we think from the perspective of residents’ everyday lives.