Dissertation

This page chronicles my journey into, through, and, hopefully, after my dissertation research at the University of South Florida. Ultimately, the dissertation is a documentary titled Tampa Technique: Rise, Demise, and Remembrance of Central Avenue that explores place and race and how we remember these contextual, complex ideas in time and space. Through many levels of the research process, this documentary intersects the Civil Rights Movement, civil disturbances in the 1960s, integration, and urban renewal (or urban removal, depending on your perspective) through Central Avenue. In many iterations, rewrites, reflections, more rewrites, and various research papers, this documentary spawns an exploration of whiteness, collective and public memory, and social construction among a wide array of other academic concepts, methods, philosophies, and theories. A blog will follow and outline the progress of my dissertation research project. Tentatively, I hope to host the first public screening of Tampa Technique on the 50th anniversary of Martin Chambers' death that sparked the civil disturbance in Tampa on June 11, 1967.