History in a Time of Forgetting

Join the Bowman Center for a Community Conversation centered around the film How Do We Begin.

A collaboration between the CRLT Players and the Duderstadt Center, this innovative, Emmy Award-winning film is based on a series of short plays written by U-M alumx Jordan Harris. The film explores Black student experiences past and present, and the ways institutions perpetuate anti-Blackness while simultaneously aiming to advance stated commitments to inclusion and equity.

Following the film screening, participants will engage in discussion designed and facilitated by the CRLT Players and Trotter Multicultural Center staff that offers the opportunity to:

• Reflect on historical tensions within U-M’s values and their present-day impact
• Examine institutional patterns that may hinder progress
• Explore role-based ways to take action and advance meaningful change

This session will be the first of three planned Community Conversations in dialogue with the Bowman Center’s 2026-27 theme: Community in Action.

Centering campus activism, this year’s Community Conversations will ask participants to reckon with complex histories and legacies of campus exclusion, activism, and resistance; reorganize through togetherness and intergenerational, cross-role coalition building; and reimagine campus activism.