Awardee: Domenic DeSocio
Semester of Award: Fall 2021
Materials Awarded: Oculus virtual reality headsets (3) and Wander mapping software
Project Description:
Because of the pandemic as well as financial limitations, my students would not have been able to travel to Berlin to walk the neighborhoods that they were learning about and mapping with locations of queer community and nightlife spaces from the 1920s. Thus, the virtual reality headsets allowed students to place themselves within the (albeit contemporary) streets and addresses that they had researched. This enabled them to “walk” the streets from one location to the next, acquiring a more embedded and experiential knowledge about how spaces and marginal identities interact in the cityscape. They could more directly feel the reasons why most LGBTQ+ spots were in certain areas by navigating public transportation, access, and urban design as “seen” through the headsets. Using virtual reality made their somewhat distant and dry archival research more relevant and exciting for them, as they could see how one spot on a map can transform from gay bar, for example, to a contemporary supermarket, giving rise to questions about equity, gentrification, the flow of history, and how the financial aspects behind community spaces. Overall, this grant had a tangible and indispensable effect on student learning.