Joseph Plaster

Joseph Plaster (born 1978) is a writer, curator, and public humanities scholar based in Baltimore and the San Francisco Bay Area. He is Curator in Public Humanities and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Center at Johns Hopkins University. He is also a Lecturer in Hopkins' Program in Museums and Society and a member of the Faculty Board for the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. His books include Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin (2023). 
== Life and work ==
Plaster earned a B.A. in History from Oberlin College and a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. He worked as a Public Humanities Director for the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, CA. He currently serves on the OutHistory Advisory Board, City of New York; the International Advisory Board, Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University, and the International Advisory Board, Malmö Life Stories, Malmö, Sweden. 
=== Polk Street: Lives in Transition ===
From 2008–10, Plaster recorded more than seventy oral histories from people experiencing the transformation of San Francisco's Polk Street from a working-class queer commercial district to a gentrified entertainment destination serving the city’s growing elite. Oral histories enabled him to document a local past rich in non-biological family structures, which he interpreted through public “listening parties,” professionally mediated neighborhood dialogues, a traveling multimedia exhibit, and radio documentaries. The project challenged gentrifiers’ claims to be promoting “safety” and “family” by positing alternative understandings of both concepts drawn from oral histories with transgender women, queer homeless youth, sex workers, and working-class gay men who had made Polk Street their home. Plaster produced Polk Street Stories for National Public Radio's Hearing Voices in 2010. 
=== Vanguard Revisited ===
In 2010 and 2011, Plaster worked with activist minister Megan Rohrer and trans youth organizer Mia Tu Mutch to enlist marginally housed youth in documenting, interpreting, and performing the history of San Francisco’s Tenderloin in relation to their own lives—to position themselves as part of its genealogical lineage and embody its counter-history through the arts and reenactment. The process was aligned with Participatory Action Research, which enables marginalized publics to frame research questions, project design, and interpretation with the goal of generating social change. Their project zine Vanguard Revisited (2011) illuminates continuities and discontinuities in the lives of street youth activists over the previous fifty years.
=== San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project ===
Plaster documented San Francisco’s AIDS direct action movement by recording oral histories with people who were involved in Enola Gay, the ARC/AIDS Vigil, AIDS Action Pledge, ACT UP/Golden Gate, Prevention Point, and ACT UP/San Francisco, a highly visible and influential group of militant AIDS activists associated with a national network of independent organizations that shared the name AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Project outcomes included oral histories with more 40 ACT UP veterans; an exhibition at the GLBT History Museum; and a multimedia Internet presence.
=== Kids on the Street ===
Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin (Duke University Press, 2023) explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States, and in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in particular, over the last century. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and oral history research, the book explores the social trauma inflicted on street youth and the ways they have worked, collectively and creatively, to reframe and reinterpret those brutal realities. The book focuses on four world-making practices: kinship networks Plaster's informants call “street families,” which resemble the moral economies common among people with severely limited resources; syncretic religious formations Plaster calls “street churches,” which are often based on a streetwise, gothic Catholicism; storytelling strategies that enabled youth to secure employment in the district’s vice and bar economies and, at times, to reinterpret the abuse from which they were running; and migratory circuits that connected far-flung tenderloin districts across the country and the people who traversed them, all the while fostering alternative socialities, cooperative economies, and novel forms of mutual aid.
=== Peabody Ballroom Experience ===
The Peabody Ballroom Experience is a collaboration, coordinated by Plaster, between Johns Hopkins University and the ballroom scene, a counterpublic composed primarily of queer and trans artists of color. The project cultivates an exchange of knowledge between JHU and ballroom, bringing together faculty, students, and performers as partners in education. Components include film screenings, panel discussions, dance workshops, oral histories, a documentary film, and ball performance competitions at the opulent Peabody Library. Library curators work with the event’s organizers and participants to present them with selections from the Sheridan Libraries’ collections during workshops and gatherings. Those books, which are interpreted by ballroom performers and organizers, are used to produce the events.
== Awards ==
* National Council on Public History, Outstanding Public History Project Award, Peabody Ballroom Experience, 2023
* American Historical Association’s Allan Bérubé Prize for outstanding work in public GLBT history, 2010
* National Council on Public History, Outstanding Public History Project Award, Honorable Mention, Polk Street: Lives in Transition, 2011
Category:American people
[[Category:American writers]
Category:1978 births