Uncommon Knowledge Challenge
Published on: 02/19/13
How do the material, cultural, intellectual and social contributions of African Americans shape your day-to-day life? This is a question that Zanya Harriott ’14 is asking members of the Haverford community to consider in her week-long project, Uncommon Knowledge, in which students, faculty and staff have been invited to make the attempt to live their day-to-day lives without crucial inventions by black people.
You can follow the project by going to the OMA Facebook page, which you can get to from the button on www.haverford.edu/deans/oma.
Zanya is offering nightly video updates on the challenges for the next day, along with histories of inventors such as Alice H. Parker, who in 1919 invented a heater with a mechanism that regulated the flow of heat to different rooms in a building (my household tried to do without this but when the interior hit 57 degrees, key constituencies staged a successful revolt). For today, the theme is “The Daily Grind” — what are those common items that are ubiquitous and part of the fabric of our everyday lives?
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