THE TRENTON PROJECT is a workshop for community research, storytelling, advocacy, and art. Founded and led by Purcell Carson, it is a home for multi-disciplinary creative work, where we listen closely to how individuals experience the post-industrial American city. Alison Isenberg joined The Trenton Project in 2016, deepening our historical scholarship and broadening our role in today's public conversations. We investigate structural inequality to support social reckoning. We cross borders to examine international migration. We aim to show up to for local, face-to-face, community building. 

 

We see film as a tool of investigation, a framework for close listening, and an amplifier for the voices of a city. We have shown our work at Princeton University, in Trenton, and elsewhere in New Jersey, We're honored to have screened at: Artworks Trenton, Westminster Presbyterian Church, The College of New Jersey, Rutgers University, Trenton Film Festival, Princeton Student Film Festival, Princeton's Trinity Church, Mercer County Technical School, and the Princeton Arts Council.  

 

In addition to our student work, showcased here, THE TRENTON PROJECT offers a framework for long-term investigations and creative projects.  In 2016, Purcell Carson and Alison Isenberg began to focus on and teach about the 1960s, looking at factors surrounding the protests and violence of 1968.  That collaborative research, focused on the life and of one Black college student, Harlan Joseph, who was shot and killed by a white police officer in 1968, will result in Isenberg's book, Uprisings, and Carson's film, Harlan B. Joseph Was Here. This work is the product of years of original archival research and teaching, over eighty interviews, public programming, community engagement with other oral history initiatives and an ongoing effort to create a park in Trenton in Harlan Joseph's memory. Our work is an ongoing, lived exploration of how historical research, writing, film production, digital archives, and public history cross-pollinate and inform each other. 

 

Another focus of THE TRENTON PROJECT looks at Central American migration to Trenton. That work has led to three cohorts of student films and a collaboration with visual anthropology students at Guatemala's University del Valle. Our 2023 screening at Westminster Presbyterian included a simultaneous screening and event for audiences and film participants in Salcajá, Guatemala.  The films were also screened by The College of New Jersey's Guatemalan Student Association. Purcell's feature documentary about the ties between Salcajá and Trenton is currently in post-production.

 

Since 2012, we have been fortunate to earn the generous support of the Princeton's School for Public and International Affairs and SPIA in New Jersey, the Program in Community Engaged Scholarship, the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities, the History Department, the Program in Urban Studies, the Program in Journalism, the PACE Center, the Office of Community and Regional Affairs, and Princeton's Firestone and Mudd Libraries. The Trenton Public Library's Trentoniana room has been an ongoing partner. We've been honored to lead a number of cohorts of summer interns, both directly through The Trenton Project, the Darien Internship in Princeton's Program in Community Engaged Scholarship and the Aspiring Scholars and Professionals Program in the Emma Bloomberg Center. Our work on the 1960s was supported by the 250th Fund in Innovative Undergraduate Education and the Princeton Histories Fund. We're honored to have received recognition from the New Jersey Historical Commission.   Alison Isenberg's book is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and Purcell Carson's work in Guatemala was funded through the Fulbright Program.