Acknowledgments

This project was committed to emergent strategies that allowed us to learn from, adapt to, and grow with each other as the project progressed. We value community care, mutual respect, and reciprocity. We see the recognition of contributions and concrete expressions of gratitude as integral to those values. This is a page where we acknowledge those who contributed to and influenced the project. 

Peggy Seiden | Retired Swarthmore College Librarian & Previous Project Director

Peggy Seiden served in the position of College Librarian for Swarthmore College from 1998-2021. She saw the Library’s role not just as a disseminator of information, but also as an active force in activating the resources at its disposal for deeper public engagement. Peggy was integral in applying for and receiving a Pew Center for Arts and Heritage grant for Rosine 2.0. The project was initiated by and continues to be indebted to her vision.

BetweenSpace | Facilitators – Everybody Meetings & Rosine School

BetweenSpace—initiated by Phoebe Bachman and Leigh Brown—engages communities in radical imagination and transformation through co-design and facilitation, working with philanthropic and non-profit organizations, public sector institutions, and purpose-driven companies.

Jerri Allyn | Previous Rosine 2.0 Artist

Jerri Allyn creates projects that transcend the boundaries between art and life. She is interested in civic engagement that provides a forum for multiple voices. Often collaborating, Allyn selects the creative form based on the site, community collaborators, and intention. Past projects have involved radio, video, billboards, printmaking, site-responsive interactive installations; etc. She is active in the feminist art movement, co-founding performance groups, including The Waitresses, who explored labor conditions; and Sisters of Survival (SOS), an anti-nuclear collective that brought artists, activists, and citizens together. Since 2015, Allyn has been working with See It End It, a team addressing human trafficking (including sex negative coercion); and artists engaged in sex positive projects including the labor rights of Sex Workers.

Dr. Sharrelle Barber | Guest Speaker – Rosine School (Philadelphia-Centered Analysis)

Sharrelle Barber, ScD, MPH is a social epidemiologist whose research focuses on the intersection of “place, race, and health” Dr. Barber is a faculty member in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health and in May, the Inaugural Director of the Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements, and Population Health Equity.

Sultana Bibi | Previous Rosine 2.0 Harm Reduction Organizer

Sultana Bibi, is an immigrant, queer, cisgender Muslim woman. She has been advocating for the economic, human and labor rights for people who trade sex and use drugs since 2010. She is a community organizer with Project SAFE, a harm reduction organization that works at the intersection of sex work, drug use and homelessness in Philadelphia. She is also co-founder of Nightshade, a sex worker collective that centers the experiences of street-based sex workers and aims to decriminalize sex work and drug use in Philadelphia and beyond.

Nijmie Zakkiyyah Dzurinko | Guest Speaker – Rosine School (Philadelphia-Centered Analysis)

Nijmie Zakkiyyah Dzurinko is a working class Black, Indigenous and queer organizer and strategist of over 20 years from Pennsylvania. She is co-founder and co-coordinator on a volunteer basis of Put People First! PA, a statewide, base building human rights organization waging a healthcare is a human right campaign. 

Celia Caust-Ellenbogen | Guest Speaker – Rosine School (Diving Into Mira’s Papers)

Celia Caust-Ellenbogen is an archivist in the Friends Historical Library. She has spent 5+ years as a co-PI on In Her Own Right, a multi-institutional, multi-grant project to digitize and make accessible documents showcasing women's activism, 1820-1920. 

Racquel Fetzer | Thought Partner – Rosine School

Racquel Fetzer is the Senior Peer Initiatives Specialist in the Peer Culture Community Inclusion Unit within the Planning Innovation Division at DBHIDS. Racquel is a person in long-term recovery from substance use disorder, mental health challenges, and various trauma. 

Valerie Holloman | Thought Partner – Rosine School

Valerie Holloman is the Lead Community Resource Manager at National Nurse-Led Care Consortium, a PHMC affiliate. 

Nina Johnson | Guest Moderator – Rosine School (Philadelphia-Centered Analysis)

Nina Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Program in Black Studies at Swarthmore College. Consistent with her training in Urban Studies, African-American Studies, and Culture and Communication, her research interests lie in the areas of inequality, politics, race, space, class, culture, stratification and mobility. 

Monica Jones | Guest Speaker – Rosine School (Harm Reduction Roundtable Discussion)

Ms Jones is the founder and CEO of The Outlaw Project, an organization based on the principles of intersectionality to prioritize the leadership of people of color, transgender women, gender non-binary people and migrants for sex worker rights. She speaks on transgender rights, HIV/AIDS, feminism, sex work, social work, and the law and has also brought the issue of profiling of black transwomen to national attention after she was arrested under Arizona’s discriminatory “manifesting prostitution” law, which she fought and won. 

Seneca Joyner | Guest Speaker – Rosine School (Philadelphia-Centered Analysis)

Seneca Joyner is a World historian of cities and sentiment whose work focuses on Black women's radical geographies, modernity, and liberation in the Americas. She loves anarchism, Islam, abortion, and sex work wildly and feels grateful to have them all in her life.

Carolyn Levy | Guest Speaker – Rosine School (Diving Into Mira’s Papers)

Carolyn Levy is a dual-title PhD graduate from Penn State University in the Departments of History and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Departments. Her dissertation focuses on women’s prison reform and prison reform societies in 19th-century America with a focus on Philadelphia. 

Maria del Carmen Montoya | Previous Rosine 2.0 Artist

Maria del Carmen Montoya works in participatory art, performance and new media. Her primary medium is the communal process of making meaning. She believes that art can be a potent crucible for social change. Carmen’s work is often about resistance, challenging norms, and inverting power hierarchies. She also employs beauty, memory, and humor as potentially radical forces for activating communities. She has lived and worked throughout Latin America where she served as an advocate for battered women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Her work has been shown at SIGGRAPH, PERFORMA, New Museum Festival of Ideas, and Venice Biennial of Architecture.

Molly Pearson | Guest Host – Rosine School (Harm Reduction Roundtable Discussion)

Molly M. Pearson is a writer, educator, and organizer. She works with universities, advocacy and service agencies, LGBTQ organizations, and cultural institutions to engage with sexuality, culture, and systems. Through interactive workshops and cohort experiences, she creates spaces that help us imagine and move toward the future we all deserve, where no one is punished for how they live in their body. Instagram/Twitter: @mollympearson

Penelope Saunders | Guest Speaker – Rosine School (Harm Reduction Roundtable Discussion)

Penelope Saunders is the Executive Director of the Best Practices Policy Project, a national policy project dedicated to the health and rights of sex workers. She has participated in community based research projects such as Move Along, Nothing About Us Without Us, and is also a member of the New Jersey Red Umbrella Alliance.

Additional Contributors to Rosine 2.0 Culminating Events

Tim Belknap & Icebox Project Space

Rami George

Olu Okiemute

Sam Rise

Winter Schneider

Land Acknowledgment

 

Swarthmore College is on the traditional and unceded territory of the Lenni-Lenape, whose homeland includes Delaware, New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania, and southern New York. To recognize this legacy of the land is an expression of gratitude and appreciation to those whose territory we reside on, and a way of honoring the Indigenous people who have been living and working here from time immemorial. For over 10,000 years the Lenni-Lenape have been the caretakers of these lands and of The River of Human Beings, more commonly known as the Delaware River. 

The Lenape were the first tribe to sign a treaty with the United States and the first tribe to have land set aside for them in New Jersey. During the 18th century, the Lenni-Lenape were systematically displaced and thousands of Lenape people were forced off their land through violence and deception. By the 1860s, the United States government sent most Lenni-Lenape people to present-day Oklahoma under the Indian Removal Act. A large number of Lenape families though still remain in the area and continue the traditions of their ancestors.

Land acknowledgements do not exist in a past tense, and any acknowledgment by itself is a small gesture. It becomes meaningful when coupled with authentic relationships and informed action. But this beginning can be an opening to greater public consciousness of Native sovereignty and cultural rights, a step towards an equitable relationship and reconciliation. This acknowledgement demonstrates a commitment to beginning the process of working to dismantle ongoing legacies of settler colonialism, and to recognize the hundreds of Indigenous Nations who continue to resist, live, and uphold their sacred relations across their lands.

Note: This content was adapted from a land acknowledgement created by the Native American Heritage Month (NAHM) Committee at Swarthmore College.