The Southern Memory Workers Collaborative is a network of activists, organizers, and cultural workers who are dedicated to documenting, preserving and stewarding stories, traditions, and liberatory practices in the U.S. South.

The advisory committee is currently composed of:

• Ashby Combahee (s/he/they) is a memory worker and full-time librarian & archivist at the Highlander Research and Education Center. As a southern folk school archivist, Ashby’s subject matter expertise includes labor studies, LGBTQ history, southern folk culture, and Black radical tradition. They are an oral historian with Georgia Dusk: a southern liberation oral history and the Georgia Transgender Oral History. They’re also a songster and multi-instrumentalist, including the most recently learned instrument – banjo.
• Margaret Lawson (they/them) is a queer community historian and public educator raised in central Mississippi. Margaret currently serves as the Director of Programming and Outreach for Invisible Histories, a nonprofit dedicated to locating, researching, and making accessible LGBTQ+ southern history. They also serve as the Director of Connections and Memory for Jxnology and the Free Folx Skool, a radical art collective and folk school project in Jackson, Mississippi. Margaret hopes to dedicate their life to making accessible stories of queer resistance and community building in the South, and in their work they strive always to close the artificial gaps created between the fields of archiving and history and the world of current activism and liberation struggles.
• Maranda Perez (they/she) is Highlander Research and Education Center’s Library and Archive Collections Manager, based in New Market, Tennessee. They are a historian and movement librarian looking to make information easily accessible and usable for the purpose of collective liberation.
• Dartricia Rollins (she/her) is a Visiting Librarian for Oral History in the Rose Library at Emory University. She is the co-founder of Georgia Dusk: a southern liberation oral history. Dartricia is an organizer with the Black Alliance for Peace and the Jericho Movement. She is a volunteer of WRFG 89.3 and co-host of the Revolutionary African Perspectives (RAP) radio show.
• Caroline Rubens (she/her) is a cultural worker and archivist who lives in eastern Kentucky. She recently concluded a 16-year tenure at Appalshop, where she preserved and provided access to a multimedia archive documenting Appalachian history, art, and social movements. Caroline advocates for the preservation of marginalized community histories and, in 2017, co-coordinated the conference track “Disrupting Mainstream History: Memory Keeping, Storytelling, and Archives” at the Allied Media Conference. She holds an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU and believes that archives are spaces for connecting with the past, and for imagining new futures.
• Sophie Ziegler (they / them) is an archivist, oral historian, parent, and aspiring juggler with over fifteen years’ experience in the cultural heritage field. They are the founding director of Solidarity History Initiative, which interfaces between organizers and cultural heritage institutions. They host the podcast “What Is Solidarity History?” to explore the overlap between memory work and movement organizing. They founded the (since sunsetted) Louisiana Trans Oral History Project, co-founded Mapping Trans Joy, and run the zine library Screaming Into The Future.

The Documentarian:

• V Starks (he/they) is an Atlanta-based cultural worker, interdisciplinary artist, and creative facilitator committed to organizing toward a more liberated South. A storyteller at heart, they have a deep interest in community archiving and memory work. He is a prospective MLIS student and aspiring librarian / archivist. V is the founder and one of the stewards of QueerSouf, an emergent audio program and zine centered on Southern QTBIPOC (and especially Black) communities and our praxes of survival, culture-making, and world-building. The project will feature experimental storytelling, oral histories, and musical performances.

Why?

Our movements need memory workers now more than ever. However, the barriers to learning the skills associated with archival science, oral history, and related fields remain significant, especially in the Southern U.S. The Collaborative seeks to identify and increase training opportunities for Southern movement memory workers and to deepen connections between cultural workers and memory workers across the region.

How?

The work of the Collaborative will focus on the following goals:

• Conduct regional landscape analysis and skills assessment of southern memory work practices.
  Identify and foster relationships among partnering organizations, community groups, and individuals to further the implementation of the southern memory worker collaborative.
• Connect southern memory workers to folk school traditions and practices across the southeast U.S.

Tour

In May, 2025, the Collaborative is doing a series of site-visits across the Southeast United States. This trip focuses on sites that demonstrate folk school frameworks of cultural stewardship through archival practices, artmaking, and food justice. The folk school framework involves noncompulsory, noncompetitive communal learning in a postsecondary setting. The Collaborative draws on Highlander’s tradition of folk schooling which cultivates studying as an act of challenging the existing social order for advancing democracy.

Host Sites:

During the tour, the Collaborative is partnering with the following sites:

• Sankofa Gardens Sankofa Gardens is a creative community and fresh food oasis in Shreveport, LA. Historically, Sankofa Gardens operated under the umbrella of Sankofa Vision, Inc. founded in 2004. Our central programming is around art, culture, community building towards cultivating healthy people, healthy communities, and healthy futures. The word Sankofa derives from a Ghanain proverb that means remembering lessons and wisdoms of the past to build the future. Focused on families in the local community, our programs impact mostly low-income people. Building on the foundation of the first phase of our work, Sankofa is reenging community towards the vision of establishing the Louisiana Heritage Folk School [ Sankofa Gardens.
• Jxnology is a youth-led, artivism and wellness collective that brings together diverse artists to empower and inspire through learning, wellness, and creativity. Jxnology believes that young people deserve safe and supportive spaces to explore their creativity and passions, and that by investing in the next generation of young artists and youth program providers, we can create a more just and equitable world.
• Free Folx Skool We are Free Folx: bold, creative, and determined to build a just and equitable world. We resist oppression and dismantle systems that harm us. We resource ourselves and our communities with tools for growth, health, and creativity. We create spaces of respite where rest and healing are acts of defiance. We commit to reclamation, taking back our stories, power, and possibilities. We demand reparation for the harm inflicted upon us and our ancestors, charting a path toward collective liberation. Together, we embody dignity, freedom, and determination, standing as a testament to the power of hope, action, and unity.
• Invisible Histories is a community-based archive that preserves, researches, and creates educational and community-centered content about the rich and diverse history of LGBTQ people, places, and events in the U.S. South. Invisible Histories is a repository for the experiences and culture of LGBTQ people in the region. We focus on ensuring that history is not only saved for future generations but also is accessible to those who wish to use it today. We strive to accurately represent the complex history of the LGBTQ South and provide resources, training, and other educational opportunities for those wishing to preserve their own community’s legacy.
• Highlander Center Highlander is located on the indigenous land of the eastern Cherokee — the Tsalaguwetiy, otherwise known as New Market, Tennessee. Founded in 1932, Highlander has centered the experiences of directly impacted people in our region, knowing that together, we have the solutions to address the challenges we face in our communities and to build more just, equitable, and sustainable systems and structures. Our workshops and programming unite people across issues, identity, and geography to share and develop skills, knowledge, and strategies for transformative social change.