When Lisa Berry — “Miss Lisa” to her close friends — moved with her family to Madison from Tennessee 15 years ago, she felt a warring sense of welcome and alienation. She had hoped she, her husband and four children would be comfortable returning to the Midwest, the place where she had grown up herself. But while certain aspects of the city’s Black community made them feel at home, she says her children encountered hurtful microaggressions and discrimination in the public school system.
“I will never consider myself a Madisonian,” Berry says. “I consider myself [to be someone who has] lived in Madison. And why? It’s because I think Madison has so much work to do, for me to think of this as home.”
Berry is just one of the stories that has been captured by The SoulFolk Collective, a new research lab created by Assistant Professor of African American Studies Jessica Lee Stovall (’07). Working with a team of 11 undergraduate and graduate students from disciplines across campus, Stovall has spent the last several months interviewing Black Madison residents from varied economic and social backgrounds across the city to characterize the range of the Black experience in Madison.
Stovall, a UW–Madison alumna who returned to join the faculty in 2023, researches the way Black spaces are constructed. Before coming to Madison, she studied the ways Black teachers working in the San Francisco Bay area formed what she and other Black Studies scholars have called “fugitive spaces” — spaces where Black people have come together to help each other strategize, survive and feel joy in spaces dominated by white people. To her, the SoulFolk Collective is a natural extension of her work with Bay Area teachers.
“This is doing a Black geographies project to really look at how Black people navigate space, and how they find and design spaces where they feel like they can be their full selves,” Stovall explains.
The research is being conducted in partnership with Madison’s Center for Black Excellence and Culture, an in-progress building and community project set to open this fall. It’s led by Reverend Dr. Alexander Gee Jr. (’85), who also teaches in the Department of African American Studies. Gee, who grew up in Madison and holds a bachelor’s degree and an honorary doctorate degree from UW–Madison, hopes to use the data from the oral interviews to guide how the Center’s eventual programming could meet Madison’s Black community’s needs.
In addition to traditional interviews, the Collective’s researchers are conducting “go-along” interviews where they use a dash-cam to videotape the subject driving around neighborhoods and visiting locations in Madison that have special meaning for them. For Berry, that meant the Fountain of Life Covenant Church on West Badger Road, where she first met Dr. Gee, who welcomed her family into the congregation and asked them to lead a Bible study session. It also meant a visit to the Orange Shoe Yoga Studio in Fitchburg, where she takes hot yoga classes from a Black instructor.
“This type of methodology has really allowed us more connection with Black residents to be able to see places of Madison, experience them, and have shared memory in those actual spaces,” says Stovall. “They take us all over.”
Ziyen Curtis, a doctoral student in the School of Education, serves as the lab manager for the project, facilitating the subject interviews and collecting data. Curtis says the experience has both touched them deeply and given their young research career a clearer direction.
“It’s people discussing their Black history, the history of their families, the history of where they’re from, the history of why this land or another land matters to them. I think that’s a really powerful thing to talk about,” says Curtis. “The connections I’ve been able to make in interviews are just really meaningful and valuable to me as a researcher.”
Stovall and her team hope to collect up to 90 interviews with residents from a range of Black and Afro-Latino cultures, many of whom did not grow up in Madison. (They’re currently sitting around 52 and actively looking to recruit additional subjects.) The SoulFolk Collective has been designed as a longitudinal study, so although much of the oral history information is being collected and shared now, the plan is to try to build on that material with photographs and, potentially, a community viewing event. The oral and go-along interviews have been collected and posted on the SoulFolk Collective’s website that just went live this week.
Stovall says that many of the interviews the students have conducted reflect some of the same themes Berry's interview revealed. For instance, researchers have interviewed several younger subjects, discovering that there’s a lack of places in Madison for them to congregate and have fun after school without being seen as a threat.
“I really think a lot about how my research can contribute to this place transforming into a space that is Black affirming. A place that allows Black people to really make a home here, feel safe and allows people to bring all of who they are to their various spaces,” says Stovall. “That means both their school and their work, but also the ways that they want to play and engage. I think it’s important for us to really think about: How do we co-construct those spaces?”