Chapter 2: Coming Together as Classmates: Participatory Heritage as Socially Just and Age-Friendly Praxis Through an Intergenerational School–University Community Preservation Project

As members of many urban communities in the United States contend with the impacts of gentrification (Tuck et al., 2014) and displacement of residents, it is imperative that marginalized communities deploy their agency to ensure the preservation of their historical archives and their past, present, and future narratives (Allen-Handy et al., 2021). Given that many Black communities, specifically, are still recovering from the ravages of the COVID-19 global pandemic and the reckoning for justice across the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, age, and class, the power of preservingstories is an urgent undertaking. As a form of preservation, participatory heritage involves multiple stakeholders in a common project that bridges between past and future legacies. Participatory heritage is a dynamic means for democratizing research in pursuit of truth, particularly in education(Caswell et al., 2016). As an inclusive, co-constructed process of archival collection building andmemory making, participatory heritage often takes place outside of formal cultural heritage institutions, and it is reflective of grassroots movements of preservation (Roued-Cunliffe & Copeland,2017).