Collegiate Times

Mindy Fullilove, Virginia Tech's Ridenour Fellow, will speak on campus today in Holden Auditorium at 5 p.m., giving a lecture titled "Community Trauma in the Context of the Current Economic Crisis."

Tomorrow, she will hold her last event, a seminar in Squires Brush Mountain B at 11 a.m. to further discuss her work with those interested. Before her appearances in Blacksburg, Fullilove sat down with the Collegiate Times to talk about her work and her visit to the Roanoke and Blacksburg area.

CT: Why did you decide to come speak at Virginia Tech, and how did you become the Ridenour Fellow here at Tech?

MF: Dr. Gerry Kearns, director of the school of public and international affairs, invited me to come speak here on campus, and he also asked me to fulfill this position. On my side, I wrote about Roanoke in my book, so I always appreciate the area and love to come further experience the areas that I wrote about.

CT: I understand that you are doing several things, from speaking at a library in Roanoke to giving a lecture to holding a seminar, with a full schedule Tuesday-Thursday. What would you say is the overall, far-reaching theme of all of these events? What are you trying to accomplish?

MF: I wrote a book five years ago called "Root Shock," and it told the story of urban renewal in Roanoke. What I want to talk about is ways in which the story has had important lessons for other cities and what people around the world can also contribute to the subject and how they are responding to the story.

CT: Your lecture is titled "Community Trauma in the Context of the Current Economic Crisis." What do you think is most important for people to understand about communities at a time like this?

MF: The main focus of the lecture is essentially, "What do we do when communities are uprooted?" The book "Root Shock" is about the effects on communities, whether it be destruction by natural disaster, policy or war. The question is always what do you do next? How do you approach recovery? Especially right now, more or less everyone is in crisis economically, and you have to ask yourself, "How do you approach these kinds of problems with even lesser resources than we had before?" I think it's mostly important for people to understand that after trauma, communities actually become more splintered than they were before. Afterwards there is often a crutch. People try to put things back together after they fracture, but that comes with a lot of tension and hostility so it's important to understand how this unfolds so that people can manage it correctly. It doesn't take money necessarily to solve the problems among people; it takes concern for each other, and organizing.

CT: What prompted you to write "Root Shock?"

MF: Growing up in the 1950s and '60s, urban renewal was going on around me, and all of us really, but I never really thought about it. Ultimately, the AIDS epidemic in the United States was linked to the destruction of communities and neighborhoods, and I wanted to be able to understand that. These stories were a helpful way of understanding that. Around that time in 1994, Mary Bishop published an article in the Roanoke Times that was about urban renewal, and that really also really helped inspire me and got me started.

CT: You've studied everything from the crack epidemic to Sept. 11 to Hurricane Katrina - do you think any area of study has been more impactful and insightful than most others?

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