Toward a Reparative Immersive Practice

While prior digital heritage efforts have focused on access and visualization, this project proposes a reparative immersive framework—one that centers Black spatial knowledge, descendant sovereignty, and narrative accountability. In Gullah Geechee communities such as Daufuskie Island, this work is urgent. Descendant families have seen their homes, praise houses, family cemeteries, and agricultural landscapes fragmented by heirs property sales, gated development, and a tourism industry that trades in myth over material history. These are not losses of nostalgia—they are fractures in continuity. Immersive documentation in this context becomes a means of re-stitching that continuity—of asserting presence in the face of removal.

Immersive tools are particularly well-suited to surface relationships otherwise invisible to planning documents or historic site surveys: the spatial logic of family compounds, the orientation of a praise house relative to tree cover, the weathering of a tabby wall over time. By capturing not just discrete objects but their environmental and cultural context—through point cloud modeling, annotated 3D environments, and multi-scalar scanning—these tools allow for the representation of place as lived, not simply as surveyed. Crucially, this documentation does not aim to fix a past in place, but to support conditions of return, continuity, and reactivation.

Yet the power of these tools lies not in their novelty, but in their use. Who wields them, for what purpose, and with whose guidance determines whether they replicate extractive logics or unsettle them. This project models a methodology of relational authorship, shaped by community-led review, oral history integration, and the epistemological leadership of stewards like Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson. It draws from traditions of Black feminist praxis and community-based design, resisting the depersonalization of conventional documentation workflows. As Ms. Robinson reminds us, “You can’t tell the story of this island from Google.” Preservation begins with proximity, not interface.

This reparative approach expands the horizon of use. Immersive scans are not static archives—they can function as tools for education, fundraising, intergenerational transmission, and legal advocacy. A 3D scan of the Robinson Family Home, viewable through VR, allows distant descendants to experience ancestral space. Annotated models of family cemeteries can support land claims or grant applications. AR overlays can embed oral histories directly into site-based tours, providing narrative context often excluded from signage. These tools do not merely visualize history—they enact speculative returns, enabling communities to engage with space that has been rendered inaccessible.

These practices do not replace political struggle. But they support its conditions. By offering richly rendered, embodied evidence of vulnerability and care, immersive tools contribute to a reparative infrastructure—a scaffold that supports future claims, policy shifts, and descendant-led planning. They provide the narrative depth and evidentiary precision required to mobilize recognition and resources. As the project’s earlier chapters have shown, platforms like Daufuskie3D do more than display memory—they support strategies of spatial repair.

One can consider this work a form of counter-mapping: not just locating memory sites, but restoring their felt, relational, and communal dimensions. In doing so, it contests dominant spatial imaginaries and affirms Black presence on its own terms. To sustain such work, however, we must invest in its infrastructure: XR labs embedded in HBCUs and cultural centers, collaborative stewardship frameworks, and policies that recognize immersive documentation as legitimate preservation.

If preservation is to be reparative, it must move at the pace of care. It must center those who have carried memory without institutional support. And it must recognize that immersive tools are not endpoints—they are openings. Through them, we glimpse not only what was lost, but what might still be returned.