Time: Friday, April 26, 7:30 PM / Location: Mansfield Municipal Building / Town Council Chamber. This program will have a simultaneous broadcast via ZOOM. Please register at the bottom of this post to recieve the ZOOM log-in instructions.
A Site of Conscience: The ‘Haunting’ Legacy at the Mansfield Training School (UCONN’s Depot Campus), a presentation by Professor Brenda Jo Brueggemann and Jess Gallagher, project co-directors for the Mansfield Training School Memorial and Museum @ UCONN, together with their research team of five undergraduate students. This project developed from research and work initially done by Jess Gallagher as a Senior Honors Thesis project.
The Mansfield Training School Memorial and Museum project explores the 133-year history of the Mansfield Training School (MTS) while focusing on its ties to the University of Connecticut (UCONN). Located less than four miles from UCONN’s main campus, the former MTS, now called the ‘UCONN Depot Campus,’ spans 350 acres but has been neglected for 30 years, resulting in boarded-up buildings covered in graffiti and ivy, vandalism, and frequent trespassing violations. Based on two years of archival and collaborative work thus far, the restorative inquiry and justice initiative aims to excavate the institutionalization of disabled lives and to educate community members about MTS’s history while promoting community and institutional accountability. This interactive program will:
- Offer highlights from the MTS timeline.
- Share a few of the traveling exhibit poster boards under construction.
- Explore some of the MTS-UCONN cross-institutional connections.
- Snapshots from the UCONN student research team’s satellite projects, which grew out of their work on the MTS project overall.