Speaker
Kacie Lucchini Butcher
Director of the UW–Madison Public History Project
Kacie Lucchini Butcher is a public historian whose work is dedicated to building empathy and advancing social justice. She is the director of UW–Madison’s Public History Project. She has worked in museums and for community organizations, helping communities reclaim their narratives through collaborative public history projects. She has experience engaging marginalized communities through historical partnerships, creating and sustaining community-centered archives, and producing historical research that foregrounds social justice. Her previous projects focused on how history is connected to the present, in efforts to explore and question systems of inequity and oppression. She is active in the public history community — hosting events and community conversations, attending trainings and editing publications — and she serves as the co-chair of the Membership Committee for the National Council on Public History. She earned her master’s degree in Heritage Studies & Public History from the University of Minnesota.
Speaking in
Reckoning with Ourselves: Developing Skills to Process and Engage with Difficult Histories
From monuments to the renaming of buildings, historical writing to museum exhibits, conversations about difficult and painful histories have come to the forefront in recent years. While some of these conversations have been productive and informative, others have been volatile and even violent. Similar to our connection with community and culture, engaging with history can cause deep reflection and natural emotional response. Yet, we often do not spend intentional time and energy developing our capacity and skills to engage with emotions as a natural part of the historical process. As our community reflects on our history through the findings of the UW–Madison Public History Project, we must also reckon with our responses to our campus history. This session will engage participants in the difficult work of building skills to process personal reactions when encountering new understandings of the past. Participants will be encouraged to be self-reflective as they learn new practices to grow their ability to engage with history and navigate their emotional responses and reactions. Participants will use scenarios and have the opportunity to dialogue and share resources for processing and de-escalating problematic responses to difficult history.
Public History Project Reception
After day one of the Diversity Forum concludes, a limited number of attendees will have the opportunity to attend a special reception for the UW–Madison Public History Project’s public exhibit: Sifting & Reckoning: UW–Madison’s History of Exclusion and Resistance.
You must have pre-registered to attend this reception because space is limited. The free reception will be from 4:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Chazen Museum (750 University Ave.). Food and beverages will be provided. Transportation will be available between Union South and the Chazen Museum. Please email events@cdo.wisc.edu with any questions or accommodation requests for this special event.
The Sifting & Reckoning exhibit takes a thematic approach to UW–Madison’s history, allowing visitors to see the multifaceted ways that racism and exclusion permeated campus life, and how the community responded, organized and resisted. Visitors can engage with objects from the UW Archives that are rarely displayed and oral-history interviews with people who fought exclusion on campus, allowing visitors a vivid, intimate account of the university’s history.
Discussion with ‘Throughline’ Podcast Co-Creators
During the reception, the Public History Project will host a special conversation from 5 to 6 p.m. with the co-hosts of NPR’s popular “Throughline” podcast: Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei as part of their campus visit as UW’s Journalists in Residence. Kacie Lucchini Butcher, the director of UW’s Public History Project, will join them in the conversation about how we understand and tell our shared history and what we can learn about ourselves and our futures from looking at our past. Professor Christy Clark-Pujara will moderate the panel discussion.