In Our Backyard is a companion to the Mansfield Training School Project. In each episode, the MTS research team picks something that stood out to them in their research on Mansfield and discusses it, drawing on oral histories, institutional records, and archival photographs. Those conversations raise questions about memory, ethics, and life inside an institution. The podcast gives the website an audio component, so people can take in the research in different ways. Every episode comes with a transcript.
Episode One
Labor, Language, and the Institution
Hosted by Kiara Korten and Payton James
A look at the gap between how the Mansfield Training School presented itself to the public and what residents lived through, and how the institution described forced, unpaid labor as “occupational therapy.”